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Palo Alto-based startup company Lumi Labs has evolved into Sunshine, which debuted on Wednesday its first product: an app that helps users to keep their mobile contact list up to date and organized with the help of artificial intelligence.
The app is currently available to iPhone users by invite only.
Sunshine, founded in 2018 by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Enrique Munoz Torres, former senior vice president of Yahoo’s ad and search department remains based in its original downtown Palo Alto office. Its goal appears to remain the same as well: to build timesaving apps for users in their everyday tasks.
“Sunshine’s technology will make the mundane effortless, free up your time, and make it easier to be thoughtful,” the two co-founders wrote in a blog on their company’s website.
With Sunshine Contacts, Mayer and Torres are starting at people’s virtual Rolodexes. The app organizes a user’s contacts — gathered from Apple and Google contacts and other online address books — conveniently into one central location, according to the company website.
The app can then update the contacts automatically and add additional information such as a person’s current job or profile picture by pulling from their LinkedIn account, for example. It can also figure out who the user might want to exchange contact information with using location data that’s accessed with permission.
Other features include removing duplicate listings and automatically pulling up the most recent email correspondence with a contact in order to, for example, have a piece of information conveniently available in the moment the user is reaching out to that individual.
“Sunshine Contacts makes contacts just work,” the founders wrote.
Sunshine promises on its website that it will offer similar products down the line that help people with “scheduling, event organization, small group communication and more.”
The company is Mayer’s first, most public move since she stepped down as Yahoo’s CEO in 2017 after the web service provider was acquired by Verizon Communications Inc. The Stanford University graduate’s first major footing in Silicon Valley was in 1999 when she joined Google as its 20th employee while the company was located on 165 University Ave. in Palo Alto. There, she helped create what Google’s now iconic, minimalistic homepage looks like today, according to a 2005 profile of Mayer by Fast Company. Now, Mayer is working out of the same office with her newly-branded software company.
“Thinking about what’s next, I returned to my roots, rented the original Google office where I started my career, and founded a lab with my longtime friend and teammate (Torres),” Mayer tweeted in 2018 when Lumi Labs first launched.
Torres has had a longstanding professional relationship with Mayer, going back to their days at Google before Mayer brought him on board to Yahoo in 2013, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Sunshine has since raised $20 million in its first round of funding from investors, including Menlo Park-based venture capital firms Felicis Ventures and Unusual Ventures, as well as from Mayer.
Sounds like just another personal data collection app. You can take the girl out of Google, but you can’t take Google out of the girl.
Another cloud-based app with more bells & whistles?
If so, it’s just one more way to track folks down via their personal & business contacts given Ms. Mayer’s extensive background at Yahoo & Google.
Amazing how so many folks are willing to surrender their private & personal information voluntarily only to complain about it later.
@Lee How amazing you comment on something you clearly did not use to tell us to not go online? Not clear whay your moral is.
The only app of hers I want is the one that fixes up that former funeral home on Middlefield that she bought. The place is a dump. It had more charm under the previous owners.
>”The only app of hers I want is the one that fixes up that former funeral home on Middlefield that she bought. The place is a dump. It had more charm under the previous owners.”
^ Wasn’t the former Roller & Hapgood site initially planned to become a meeting venue for local businesswomen?
Outside of a previously reported Halloween party, we haven’t heard much from Ms. Mayer regarding any upcoming events.
Regular grounds maintenance costs should be a ‘drop in the bucket’ expense to her and perhaps concerned neighbors should bring this issue to her attention.
Meh, I’ll take a pass…