Tech giant Apple has acquired machine learning and artificial intelligence startup Turi for US$200 million, further affirming a larger push by Apple into artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said Apple in a statement.
Turi was founded by Carlos Guestrin, a University of Washington professor. Turi’s team is expected to remain in the Seattle region and continue to grow as Apple builds out further expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Turi recently hosted a closely-watched Data Science Summit in San Francisco, in an indication of its leadership position in the field.
Apple’s plans for Turi’s technology are not clear, but the company has been making a broad push into artificial intelligence through an expansion of its Siri personal assistant and related technologies.
Turi lets developers build apps with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that automatically scale and tune. Its products —which include the Turi Machine Learning Platform, GraphLab Create, Turi Distributed, and Turi Predictive Services — are largely designed to help large and small organizations make better sense of data. Use cases include recommendation engines, fraud detection, predicting customer churn, sentiment analysis, and customer segmentation.
The company began as an open-source project at Carnegie Mellon in 2009 under Guestrin’s guidance. In 2012, he joined the University of Washington’s faculty. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos provided $2 million to endow two professorships in machine learning at the UW for Guestrin and his wife, Emily Fox. Guestrin later spun off the open-source project from the UW into its own company, at the time called GraphLab. He remains the University of Washington’s “Amazon Professor of Machine Learning,” according to his LinkedIn profile.