Apple has bought Inductiv to integrate the latter's machine learning data cleanup expertise, based on Stanford, Wisconsin-Madison and Waterloo faculty innovations.
Consumer electronics firm Apple has paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Inductiv, a Canada-based machine learning technology provider co-founded by Stanford, Waterloo and Wisconsin-Madison faculty, Bloomberg reported yesterday.
Apple confirmed to the newswire that the deal had taken place without providing further deals.
Inductiv’s engineering staff had transferred in recent weeks to work on Apple’s machine learning and data science projects, including its voice-controlled smart assistant Siri.
The company focused on machine learning tools that automatically identified and corrected errors in databases in order to help train artificial intelligence models with less human intervention. It does not appear to have revealed any funding rounds.
Inductiv’s co-founders included Christopher Ré, an associate professor in Stanford University’s AI Lab who previously helped launch deep data analysis spinout Lattice Data, also acquired by Apple in 2017.
Ihab Francis Ilyas, professor in University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science, and Theodorus Rekatsinas, assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Database Group, were the other co-founders.
The move further strengthens Apple’s AI and data science program after multiple deals for the corporate in the same area, including that of edge computing framework developer Xnor.ai, a spinout of Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
