Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup (techcrunch.com)

Marissa Mayer is shutting down her consumer-software startup Sunshine and selling its assets to her new AI venture, Dazzle, according to Wired reporting based on a shareholder email. Dazzle — reportedly focused on building an AI personal assistant — will absorb Sunshine’s employees and most investors (including Norwest Venture Partners, Felicis, and SV Angel) have signed off on the deal. Sunshine, founded in 2018, pivoted from a subscription contact manager to adding event management, photo sharing and some AI features in 2024, but never gained traction (its Android apps show just over 1,000 downloads). The company raised roughly $20M as of 2020 and Mayer later said it had been largely self-funded. For the AI/ML community this is notable for two reasons: first, it signals talent and product consolidation rather than continued iteration on a struggling consumer app; second, it underscores how prominent founders are refocusing resources on assistant-style AI products that leverage LLMs and multimodal inputs. Technically, Dazzle inherits Sunshine’s codebase, user-facing UI/UX work, and engineering team — assets that could accelerate development of contact-, calendar- and photo-aware assistant capabilities. The move also raises questions about privacy and data governance if existing user data or interaction models are repurposed for a new, more powerful assistant.