Marissa Mayer is back and she wants to fix your address book

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Wednesday announced the launch of Sunshine, a consumer app startup that is debuting an address book app that’s powered by artificial intelligence.

Sunshine is Mayer’s first company and has been back in the spotlight since stepping down as CEO of Yahoo after the company’s $ 4.48 billion sale to Verizon in 2017.

Upon launch, Mayer’s start-up is rolling out Sunshine Contacts, an address book app that relies on AI to find and merge duplicate contacts, fill in incomplete information, and permanently maintain that information. day. The app integrates with the iOS Contacts app as well as Gmail and will be free to all iOS users with an invitation.

“The idea is that Sunshine Contacts essentially becomes the brain that manages your contacts,” Mayer told CNBC. “Contacts, in our opinion, should be a living and changing thing.”

The app is also designed to make it easier to share your contact information with other people or to keep that information up to date for others. One feature, for example, allows users to change their contact information in the app and pass it as an update to other people who have their information and use Sunshine Contacts.

“As I’m working on contacts some days I’m really pissed off and concerned that there are thousands of people who still have my Google or Yahoo email address,” Mayer said, before doing the demonstration of this feature.

For Mayer, working on consumer applications is a return to form. Mayer built his reputation in the tech industry as a product manager during his tenure at Google.

It was there that in 2003 she met her Enrique Muñoz Torres, her co-founder of Sunshine. There, the two collaborated on a number of projects, including iGoogle, a now-defunct Google product that allowed users to turn Google’s website into a personalized homepage for their browser. Mayer originally opposed the idea of ​​iGoogle, but Torres’ presentation of the project convinced her.

“I was the keeper of the Google home page. It was my job to keep it clean, and Enrique got up and his idea was to just put a bunch of stuff on it, and he knew I’d be just like, “No,” “Mayer said.” The way that sometimes he formulates his arguments makes me think things differently. “

Torres followed Mayer to Yahoo in 2013, as senior vice president of search and ads. The two began discussing Sunshine’s core ideas during their senior year at Yahoo, Mayer said. They decided that the ideas didn’t make sense at the time, but deserved to be revisited.

The two left Yahoo when the sale to Verizon closed in June 2017.

“Six months later Enrique called me and we got together and he said, ‘I’m still excited to start this business that we were talking about a year ago’ and I was like ‘I am. also “”, recalls Mayer.

Both have been working on Sunshine since 2018. The company is based in Palo, Alto, Calif., And has raised a $ 20 million funding round from inside and outside investors including Felicis Ventures, Unusual Ventures and WIN Ventures.

“Over time, I have developed a tremendous amount of respect for Marissa as a product designer and also for Marissa as a person,” Torres said. “Working with Marissa to think about this business and think about products elsewhere, the alignment has always been very quick.”

Sunshine Contacts is the first in a suite of planned consumer applications. They aim for Sunshine to release apps focused on family sharing, planning, organizing events and communicating in small groups on the go. By improving contacts, Sunshine will create a base from which to build other apps, Mayer said.

“We think contact issues are pervasive but a lot of people have learned to be content with the status quo,” Torres said. “This is the class of problems we like to gravitate towards.”

Mayer called these kinds of apps “small-scale sharing,” saying consumers have evolved over the past two years. They no longer want mega apps that take care of everything for them, but are open to having more apps that are really effective at serving specific purposes, Mayer believes.

“The mega app that does it all for everyone is something that has become less attractive over time,” she said. “We want to have apps that address specific issues.”

Consumers have also become more comfortable paying for apps that provide them with value, Mayer said. While Sunshine Contacts is free at launch, Mayer envisions a further freemium business model in which users can pay for additional features in Sunshine apps.

Unlike most mainstream tech companies, Sunshine promises not to build a business from data stored by users in its services.

“The data you provide to us, you give it to us for the purpose of improving your experience with the product,” Torres said. “We’re not going to target advertising based on this data, we’re not going to sell it in aggregate form, in individual form, in any form.”

He added: “We don’t think it’s reasonable to take advantage of user data.”