In an effort to bolster its hold in artificial intelligence in developing Siri and alikes, Apple has acquired a Hyderabad (India)-based machine learning startup Tuplejump–that helps companies to store, process and visualize Big Data– for an undisclosed amount.
In a standard statement, an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch:
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,”
Tuplejump was founded in 2013 by Rohit Rai, Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu and Deepak Alur. While Rai and Buddhavarapu, according to their LinkedIn pages, have moved to Apple–working as Software Engineer and Engineering Manager respectively– post-acquisition, Alur has joined Anaplan and is heading the engineering team at the cloud-based analytics platform for sales, operations and finance sector.
Techcrunch also cited that, Apple is particularly interested in Tumplejump built “FiloDB”, an open-source project that aims at applying machine learning concepts and analytics to massive amounts of complex data sets. While Tuplejump, as a standalone company, claimed to be an early adopter of Big Data technology and help Fortune 500 companies manage the same.
According to Venturebeat, the Tumplejump team was well acquainted with open source big data tools such as the Apache Spark processing engine, the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, and the Apache Kafka via publish-subscribe messaging system.
Additionally, Tuplejump also built an open source search indexing system called Stargate that works with the data stored in Cassandra and relies on the fundamentals of the Apache Lucene full-text search software. Apple could use the extra help in search expertise and technology to potentially aid multiple Apple platforms, including its iOS and macOS.
The iPhone maker has recently shown a lot of interest in the machine learning domain and this deal marks its third AI buy. This year alone it signed August acquisition of Turi for $200 million (approximately); Facial recognition startup Emotient in early January for a price unknown and prior to that, Perceptio in October, 2015 to let companies run artificial intelligence systems on smartphones, also for an undisclosed amount.