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Apple has quietly acquired UK workflow automation startup Stamplay
Continuing a string of recent startup acquisitions, Apple Inc. appears to have quietly picked up a Rome-based developer of business automation software called Stamplay Ltd.
The deal, which came to light on Thursday, was worth about 5 million euros, according to Italian media reports. That’s approximately $5.6 million.
Apple hasn’t yet issued the customary statement that it releases after such acquisitions, but a recent regulatory filing submitted in the U.K., where Stamplay is incorporated, seems to confirm the transaction. The filing lists two senior members of Apple’s legal group as contact people for the startup.
Three-year-old Stamplay offered an IFTTTlike task automation platform geared toward enterprises. It enabled companies to create workflows for handling repetitive, labor-intensive chores such as synchronizing business information among disparate systems.
One of Stamplay’s main differentiators was that it made it possible to create workflows with relatively little coding. The platform provided prebuilt integrations with popular cloud services, as well as a graphic editor that allowed workers to define automation actions using mostly drag-and-drop controls. The editor also included advanced options such as the ability to require that a workflow request get manager authorization before moving data to a new system.
Stamplay managed to build up a small but respectable installed base for the platform. As recently as February, it listed Visa Inc., IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. as customers on its website, which has since stripped of most of its content in a move likely tied to the startup’s acquisition by Apple.
The news of the deal comes two weeks after the iPhone maker revealed it had bought Laserlike Inc., a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence specialist. Laserlike offered an AI-powered search engine that allowed users to scour the web for news and videos related to their areas of interest. Earlier, Apple picked up DataTiger Inc., a startup that developed digital marketing tools.
Photo: Pixabay
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