Apple Continues Acquisition Trail with Lattice.io

Following news last week that Apple had completed a deal to acquire sleep-tracking device company Beddit, the tech behemoth has completed yet another acquisition in the form of Lattice.io.

In a higher profile deal than Beddit, Apple revealed it had acquired the artificial intelligence and machine learning start-up, which takes dark data and turns it into useable information. While no official information was released as to the value of the deal, it’s speculated to have been between $175 million and $200 million.

Lattice.io spins out of a Stanford University research project entitled DeepDive, and describes itself as able to turn “dark data into structured data with human-caliber quality at machine-caliber scale.”

What is dark data? IBM estimates that 90 per cent of the data in existence today was produced in the last two years. However, between 70 and 80 per cent of that data is dark. In other words, unstructured and wholly unusable when it comes to processing and analytics. Lattice.io uses machine learning to take this dark data and put it into some kind of order so that it becomes usable.

Founded in 2015, the company has been making waves, raising at least $20 million in funding from GV, Madrona and InQTel. Despite this, it has largely remained under the radar until the Apple deal.

TechCrunch reported that the deal closed a couple of weeks ago and that about 20 engineers have joined the larger company. It’s been said in the media that Lattice’s experienced engineers are of prime importance to Apple in this deal, especially when considering it has been designing AI-type products for a long time now.

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