Apple confirms acquisition of big data startup Tuplejump

Apple today confirmed that it has acquired Tuplejump, a small startup that built software companies could use to store, process, query, and visualize data.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. (Hat tip to TechCrunch for breaking the news.)

Tuplejump cofounders Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu note on their LinkedIn profiles that they stopped working on the startup in April and joined Apple in May. The third cofounder, Deepak Alur, joined Anaplan in April.

Beyond developing the platform, the team was well acquainted with open source big data tools such as the Apache Spark processing engine, the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, and the Apache Kafka distributed high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging system.

Tuplejump also built an open source search indexing system called Stargate that works with data stored in Cassandra and relies on the fundamentals of the Apache Lucene full-text search software. More search expertise and technology could help Apple across multiple Apple platforms, including iOS and macOS.

The deal comes a month after Apple confirmed that it acquired the better-known machine learning startup Turi.

Tuplejump was founded in 2013 and was based in Hyderabad. In May Apple opened a development office in Hyderabad, with a specific focus on Apple Maps. It’s not clear how many customers the startup had. Tuplejump never said that it had raised venture capital funding.