Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo and an early employee at Google, is introducing her startup, Lumi Labs, under a new brand name: Sunshine. Alongside this rebranding, the company is releasing its inaugural product, Sunshine Contacts, an application designed to enhance how individuals manage, maintain, and exchange contact details. The company’s long-term vision includes a range of applications aimed at simplifying everyday activities related to events, organization, family connections, scheduling, and more.

Established in 2018 by Mayer and Enrique Muñoz Torres, both veterans of Yahoo and Google, Sunshine is dedicated to leveraging advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to refine commonly used applications.

Mayer explains, “Considering technology’s capability to operate a vehicle, it seems reasonable that it should be able to efficiently organize contacts, streamline scheduling, or handle other relatively simple tasks.” She states that the objective of Lumi Labs – now Sunshine – is to improve the usability and efficiency of these everyday applications.

Last year, the company released a limited experiment, Holiday Helper, a desktop application intended to simplify the creation of holiday mailing lists, providing a preview of future developments.

However, Mayer describes this initial product as more of a preliminary exercise or a preparation phase for the Sunshine team, as it wasn’t a fully developed offering.

The launch of Sunshine Contacts represents a step towards the company’s goal of utilizing contemporary technologies to improve routine processes.

The new application, upon initial inspection, shares similarities with previous attempts to improve contact organization and updating, such as Mingle, Vignette, Humin, FullContact, Bump, CardFlick, Hashable, My Name is E, CardMunch, Brewster, Plaxo, and numerous other startups that once sought to replace business cards or automatically update address books.

Although many of these earlier ventures are no longer active, alternative applications like Cardhop from Flexibits continue to attract a dedicated user base seeking enhanced features and improvements over native solutions, like Apple or Google’s address books.

Sunshine Contacts’ strategy differs by aiming not only to attract users seeking improved functionality but also to eventually provide a comprehensive suite of consumer services under the Sunshine brand.

The app’s design appears relatively simple, potentially reflecting a focus on functionality reminiscent of the Google aesthetic, prioritizing effectiveness over visual appeal.

Sunshine Contacts functions by importing data, with user consent, from iPhone contacts and Google Contacts. It then attempts to enrich this basic information by identifying a contact’s employer, locating their LinkedIn profile, automatically completing missing details, finding addresses, adding profile pictures, categorizing phone numbers as work or mobile, and more. The app also facilitates the merging of duplicate contacts.

Granting Sunshine Contacts access to Gmail allows it to scan email signatures to further populate address fields.

This approach is not novel; FullContact previously employed similar methods, as did several smaller companies. Services like Evercontact or SigParser offer comparable solutions today, while Rapportive popularized the concept of integrating external web data to provide a more comprehensive view of email contacts. (The founder of Rapportive has since expanded on this concept with Superhuman, a full-featured email client.)

When interacting with a contact, Sunshine Contacts operates somewhat like a personal CRM, offering relevant context about the relationship, including recent email exchanges. Users can also easily share their contact information with other Sunshine users through proximity detection, though this feature’s usefulness depends on widespread app adoption.

Considering that Sunshine Contacts’ features are not entirely groundbreaking, the app’s success will hinge on its ability to execute these tasks effectively.

“I believe the artificial intelligence integrated into the app is clearly evident in the quality of its performance,” Mayer explains. She notes that other apps’ contact deduplication often relies on basic matching, identifying multiple “Adam Smiths” without discerning whether they are distinct individuals.

“They don’t employ a confidence interval or an evidence-based approach,” Mayer says. “Therefore, you’ll observe the AI’s impact in the accuracy of merges, the quality of name completion, and nickname identification. We’ve implemented several intelligent features that we believe surpass existing alternatives. I also think our location integration is particularly innovative,” she adds.

Specifically, Sunshine Contacts can access a user’s location – with permission – to infer frequent interactions or facilitate contact exchange between Sunshine users in close proximity.

However, given the app’s extensive data requests – address books, email integration, location data – Sunshine faces the challenge of building user trust after instances of tech companies misusing personal data under the guise of convenience.

To address this concern, Sunshine is offering a privacy commitment, outlining data security practices and guaranteeing that user data will not be sold.

“We firmly believe that this data is not and will never be available for sale in any form,” states Torres. “You are providing us with the data solely to enhance your product experience, and that is the only purpose for which we will use it,” he continues. “We do not sell it in aggregate or individual form, nor do we use it for targeted advertising. In fact, the app does not contain any advertising,” Torres emphasizes.

Users also have the option to selectively enable features, denying location access if they prefer.

Sunshine’s business model will be a direct-to-consumer freemium model, although Sunshine Contacts is currently available free of charge. As the company introduces additional applications, it will monetize each offering based on its specific features, potentially offering basic functionality for free with paid upgrades for advanced capabilities.

The startup secured a $20M seed funding round in May 2020 from a combination of investors, including Felicis Ventures, Unusual Ventures, WIN Ventures, and various angel investors.

The app is initially launching on iOS (iOS 11 or later) on an invite-only basis in the U.S. A web version will follow, along with support for international markets.