Earlier this year, before Tim Cook’s visit to India in May, Apple acquired Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based machine learning startup, for an undisclosed amount of money. The acquisition was carried out rather quietly without making any unnecessary noise.
About Tuplejump itself, specific details are missing. However, word is that it is into AI and Big Data. It helps companies store, process, and visualise big data with its unique software. Tuple jump’s team — a small group of 16 employees — is all set to join the Apple family. And while the acquisition amount was undisclosed, experts’ back-of-the-envelope calculations estimate the valuation at around $20 million (Rs.133 crores).
Tuplejump was founded in 2013 by three people – Rohit Rai, a software engineer, Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, who is now an engineering manager at Apple, and Deepak Alur, who is presently the head of Engineering at Anaplan, a cloud-based business modelling and planning platform for sales, operations, and finance.
According to VentureBeat’s reports, the team at Tuplejump has an excellent know-how of open source big data tools. The report added, “Tuplejump also built an open source search indexing system called Stargate that works with data stored in Cassandra and relies on the fundamentals of the Apache Lucene full-text search software.”
This is Apple’s first full-fledged acquisition in India. Meanwhile, it has bought two other non-Indian artificial intelligence companies, Turi and Emotient. It looks like Apple’s focus on artificial intelligence is expanding rapidly. This new outlook is understandable, most importantly because Siri, Apple’s AI-based digital assistant, is facing increasing competition from similar services of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
Viral Shah, co-creator of open source language Julia, said, “Apple has been acquiring machine-learning companies. Increasingly, services and products are becoming AI-based – bots, speech recognition, tagging of user’s photos, finding faces.” He noted that if Apple is building a self-driving car featuring machine learning and AI, it is only natural for them to acquire talent in these areas.
So while the overall plan is clear, the specifics are still hazy. For example, Apple hasn’t given any details on the Tuplejump acquisition, only saying, as quoted from TechCrunch, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” As of now, the website of the startup has been shut down following the acquisition, and no details have been disclosed officially.
Moreover, experts are anticipating many such acquisitions of machine learning and AI startups in the near future. Indeed, among the top tech companies, the rat race for AI supremacy is already well under way. And while Apple may not the have the first-mover advantage, it sure as hell is a top contender for the podium!
