Apple has acquired the Indian startup Tuplejump. This is the fourth machine learning company acquired by the high-tech giant over a one year period.
Apple Buys Tuplejump
Tuplejump's takeover by Apple actually happened in June but went unnoticed until now, according to Bloomberg. Tuplejump founder Rohit Rai is not living in Seattle, where Turi is located and he began working for Apple in May. Among Tuplejump's dozen workers, many were already based on the U.S. west coast.
According to Tech Crunch, an Apple spokesperson said that the company usually acquires smaller technology companies from time to time without discussing its plans and purpose. Apple's exact motivation and details about the current acquisition are unknown at the moment.
Following the acquisition, Tuplejump's website has been taken down, but a capture of its "About" page by a Wayback Machine provides more details about the company. According to Tuplejump's description, the startup has been one of the early adopters of the "big-data" technologies.
Rumors claim that Apple was most interested in FiloDB, an open-source project built by Tuplejump. FiloDB is applying analytics and machine learning to processing wide quantities of incoming data. Past Tuplejump's acquisition, the FiloDB project is expected to continue independently, since it's been recently updated and it already has its own repository.
Among Apple's past investments in machine learning are included the acquisition of Perceptio in 2015, as well as Turi and Emotient earlier this year. According to Apple Insider, Apple has even created a dedicated division to machine learning within the company. This Apple group builds tools that can be used by other teams to develop their own, rather than producing machine learning technologies wholesale.
Lately, Apple is giving increasing importance to cloud services such as iTunes, Siri, Apple Music, the App Store and the iCloud Drive that is integrated into macOS Sierra launched earlier this week. Tuplejump's machine learning tools and concepts could be applied to these cloud services and this could be the reason for Apple's interest in acquiring the startup.
