After Leaving Yahoo, Meijie's AI Startup Received Another 20 Million US Dollars in Financing

Lumi Labs, a Silicon Valley startup, has raised nearly $20 million in funding. How did this little-known startup get such a huge amount of funding? This may have something to do with the big boss behind it, whose founder is none other than former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

On May 15, Lumi Labs, the startup incubator founded by Mei Jie, completed a financing of US$19.964097 million (approximately RMB 140 million). The funds will be used to develop AI-based consumer applications.

Maybe you haven’t heard of Lumi Labs, but you must know the founder behind it——Google's 20th employee and former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer.

A new beginning: Mei and her old Yahoo colleagues start AI startups

In 2017, after leaving Yahoo, Mayer, who was in her 40s, did not retire. After a brief period of silence, she started her entrepreneurial journey.

In March 2018, she co-founded Lumi Labs with former Yahoo colleague Enrique Munoz Torres (former SVP of Search and Advertising at Yahoo).The aim is to develop a smartphone application that uses artificial intelligence to solve problems in the "contacts, events and groups space" and help people "save minutes every day."

Mayer gave an example of the direction of the company's product development.Solve the common confusion in mobile address books.

Mayer said she has surveyed thousands of people in all walks of life and has never met a single person who said their address book was in perfect order.

“It’s an interesting question,” she said. “All the tools for building teams are really hard to use. We think there’s a lot that can be done here.”

In 2019, Lumi Labs launched its first product, Holiday Helper.It can help users quickly get existing contact lists, or new email lists, and help get the latest contact information.

According to reports, the team is working on a series of products and experiments.We hope to make everyday tasks smarter and more efficient, and use technology to better help people reduce the time they spend on electronic devices.

Although the problems Holiday Assistant solves may seem small compared with the world-changing ambitions of other AI entrepreneurs, Mayer said they could have a big impact on people’s lives.

“This kind of work is so mundane and time-consuming that many people don’t want to do it,” Mayer said. “But it’s like a computer chip, so basic that it benefits people every day.”

She also admitted that she missed the days when her products touched hundreds of millions of people.But with Lumi, she said, “hopefully we’ll be able to have that kind of impact at some point and meaningfully scale it up. That’s certainly something we’ll be working towards.”

Silicon Valley Rose: A legendary life, a blast at the beginning

She was once one of the most in-depth figures in the technology industry and had shown extraordinary talent since her student days. 

Her father is an engineer and her mother is an artist. She inherited the rationality and sensibility of her parents, and was influenced by her father's engineering thinking, showing extraordinary talent in mathematics and science.

When she graduated from high school, she applied to 10 schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford University, and was successful in all of them.Finally, she chose Stanford to study symbolic systems.

During college, she was not good at socializing and called herself "very shy". She was a top student who focused on her studies.

In 1999, after receiving a master's degree in computer science,She already has 12 offers, including from large companies like McKinsey and small, unknown companies like Google.

At that time, Google had just been established for a year. Although she privately analyzed Google's prospects and found that its success rate was only 2%, she was attracted by the corporate culture there and chose to join and became Google's 20th employee.

Only sleeps 4 hours a day, smarter and harder working than you

After Mayer joined Google, she began her fast-growing career in the technology field.

  The key figures behind Google's star products 

In the first few years after joining Google, she taught at Stanford University while working part-time as a Google programmer.Working 130 hours a week and sleeping only 4 hours a night.

She is a key figure behind many iconic Google products, including Google Search, Gmail, Google News, Google Maps, and others.

It took Mayer just six years to go from a part-time employee on the user interface team to a product manager to vice president of search products and user experience.

But this strong woman whose career was booming later caused dissatisfaction within Google due to management issues.

In 2011, she was moved to the Google Maps and Local product team, removing her responsibilities from Google’s most profitable search product.From then on, her strong rule at Google basically came to an end.

  Go to Yahoo: A call to action 

In June 2012, Yahoo offered her an olive branch, and she began serving as Yahoo's CEO and president in July.

As the youngest CEO in Yahoo's history, hopes were high that she would turn around Yahoo's fortunes.

At the beginning, she implemented a series of reforms at Yahoo, which subverted Yahoo's internal culture and brought about a major transformation for Yahoo.

In her first year at Yahoo, sheIt boosted Yahoo's stock price from $15.74 to around $28.

After joining Yahoo, she continued to work hard and gave birth to a son and twin daughters, but she only took two weeks and five days of maternity leave respectively.

But the good times didn't last long. In the next five years, Yahoo experienced various turbulences.

Mayer resigned as Yahoo CEO and from the company's board of directors shortly after Verizon acquired Yahoo for $4.5 billion in July 2016.

Now, returning to the place where he first entered the workplace more than 20 years ago, can this academic master, workaholic, and Silicon Valley legend once again create a product that is popular all over the world? We will have to wait and see.

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