Katie MarsalThomson Reuters' PEHub reports that Google recently acquired Agnilux, a San Jose-based startup comprised of former Apple employees, including several former P.A. Semi employees who parted ways with Apple shortly after the iPhone maker absorbed the fables chip design firm for $278 million roughly two years ago.
Among them are Mark Hayter, Olof Johansson, Todd Broch, and Dan Dobberpuhl — P.A. semi's founder and chief executive, who is believed to be the most recent departure from Apple. Others have reportedly come from both TiVo and Cisco, the latter of which was one of three companies including Microsoft and Texas Instruments that previously held strategic investment talks with Agnilux.
What makes the acquisition so intriguing is that there's little to no information in the public domain as to what Agnilux has been working on, why Google wanted it, and what it plans to do with it now that it has it.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the acquisition but declined further details. Meanwhile, Agnilux's website — which never bore anything more than a street address for the firm and the meaning behind its name — was taken offline sometime in the past week.
While it may seem logical to suggest Agnilux, due to its P.A. Semi heritage, has been developing chip technology that could better position Google to compete against Apple in the mobile space, a less-than-fruitful investigation into the company by the New York Times earlier this year may hint towards another cause.
According to the paper, the folks at Agnilux are just as tight-lipped as the company they defected from. “We want to make a splash," Hayter said when interviewed in February. "We don’t want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we’re ready."
However, an unnamed Agnilux employee later told the Times that the company is actually "working on some kind of server, and that the company has a partnership in place with Cisco." Such technology could prove beneficial to Google, which operates hundreds of thousands of servers, all of which are built in-house by its own engineers instead of purchased from suppliers like Dell or IBM.
For what it's worth, the name Agnilux is derived from agni - Sanskrit for fire and lux - Latin for light.
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49 Comments
This is turning into a joke.
These ex-P.A. Semi guys can probably show up at Shoreline Billiards, shoot a couple of games while making offhand remarks about their latest "design" and get bought out six months later, doing little more than puttering around with some CAD program on the next generation low-power CPU (ARM, MIPS, whatever).
Congratulations, guys! Mountain View has plenty of vacant commercial real estate that is ready for your next startup!
For what it's worth, the name Agnilux is derived from agni - Sanskrit for fire and lux - Latin for light.
How about a new fibre-wire communication protocol to speed up communications? This would definitely be useful to a number of innovative companies. The chosen name is so close to FireWire as to suggest more than a coincidence.
Google has been buying a new company every day for the past six months. Their lack of direction reminds me of MS circa 2000.
Maybe it's WebTV.
Uhhhhhhhhhh, let me guess. It's uhhhhhhhhhh, a set top box or a Google TV.
Let me guess more. The Apple TV wasn't going anywhere so Apple employees left and genius Google snapped them up.
If you want something really entertaining, watch dork pizza face Eric Schmidt (Bill Gates II) take the stage at the MacWorld 2007 keynote on Apple's site.