Amber Neely
Shopping search startup Fashwell employees started listing Apple as an employer on their LinkedIn profiles, hinting that the company may have been purchased by the iPhone maker.
Fashwell has designed a visual AI search engine to recognize products in images so viewers can purchase them. Fashwell's API also allows users to tag any image, allowing companies to auto-tag images quickly and precisely over a range of categories, including color, occasion, pattern, and design.
If Apple has purchased Fashwell, it would add to the collection of other artificial intelligence startups and talent that it has hired in recent history.
According to MacRumors, the Fashwell CEO Matthias Dantone, CSO Lukas Bossard, and CTO Michael Emmersberger all list Apple as an employer since 2019.
Fashwell's website and Twitter account is still up and running but has not been updated since late 2018. This suggests a timeline for the acquisition, dating it to around December 2018.
Six other employees now list Apple as an employer on LinkedIn, most of which are now listed as being a part of Apple's machine learning team.
Apple is also reportedly in the process of acquiring self-driving shuttle company Drive.ai, suggesting that the company is looking to ramp up its foray into artificial intelligence and machine learning.
AppleInsider has reached out to Apple and Fashwell for comment and has not as of yet received a response.
Malcolm Owen
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Charles Martin
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Andrew Orr
2 Comments
Been wanting something like this for years. Great for when you see items in public outside of stores.
Aim your iPhone camera at a pair of shoes and this pops up:
GLOBALWIN Mens M16666769 Fashion Sneaker $19.99
Every time I've used these image recognition services for shopping, I've been underwhelmed. I hope one day things take off and we have a Shazam for vision.
Has anyone had even half decent success with Amazon's offering?