Marissa Mayer Is Dissolving Her Sunshine Startup Lab

Sunshine, the patron AI startup based by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2018, has seen brighter days.

The small startup is shutting down and its belongings are being bought to a brand new entity included by Mayer, known as Dazzle, in accordance with an e-mail considered by WIRED. Mayer despatched the e-mail to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has formally included and is able to purchase Sunshine’s holdings.

The deal requires approval from shareholders, together with Sunshine cofounder Enrique Muñoz Torres, Norwest Enterprise Companions, Felicis Companions, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the PR agency Archetype Company, and others. As of Sunday afternoon, 99 p.c of shareholders had signed, in accordance with sources near the state of affairs. Mayer herself is the corporate’s largest shareholder and investor.

The e-mail didn’t elaborate on what Dazzle’s goal can be, however sources inform WIRED that Mayer is eyeing a brand new type of AI private assistant. Sunshine’s roughly 15 staff expect to seek out new roles at Dazzle, sources say.

“After cautious consideration, Sunshine’s administration, and 99.99% of its shareholders, decided the strongest path ahead for the corporate was to promote to Dazzle AI, a brand new firm already included and with dedicated funding,” Mayer mentioned by a spokesperson. “As Sunshine’s largest investor, shareholder, and CEO, Marissa is pleased with what the crew constructed and appears ahead to carrying that momentum into new alternatives round Dazzle.”

Mayer based Sunshine, initially known as Lumi Labs, again in 2018 after her five-year turnaround try at Yahoo. Previous to changing into CEO of Yahoo, Mayer had a storied profession at Google, the place she was worker quantity 20. Mayer designed the interface for Google Search, and helped develop Google Maps and Google AdWords.

The thought for Sunshine’s first product, an app for managing contacts, stemmed from Mayer’s personal expertise tapping into her deep community of Silicon Valley luminaries as she was attempting to launch her firm. That app, Sunshine Contacts, launched in 2020. By that time, the startup had raised $20 million in enterprise capital funding, along with Mayer’s private contributions.

Early on, the Sunshine app was suffering from complaints that it doubtlessly violated consumer privateness. The app, which used AI to establish and merge duplicate folks in your cellphone’s contacts listing, was additionally pulling in info from Whitepages to routinely add dwelling addresses to contacts.

In 2024, Sunshine launched a photograph sharing app known as Shine. Like Sunshine Contacts, Shine was broadly considered as a flop.