Startup Lumi Labs from former Yahoo-CEO working on productivity apps

Lumi Labs, a new startup of former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee Marissa Mayer, is working on apps and tools that will help people become more productive. This includes software to manage contacts.

Lumi Labs was founded last year and now employs about twenty software engineers. The contacts app is still an early test stage, tell two people who are familiar with Mayer’s plans opposite The Information. According to one of them, however, the intention is to launch the app as early as this year or early next year.

It is not clear what distinguishes the app from other similar apps from, for example, Microsoft. According to one insider, the ambitions that Mayer described to others sound like Lumi Labs is building a social network. But the plans may change over time.

The startup also wants to launch apps that are broadly linked to the mission to help people introduce others and to schedule events.

Marissa Mayer

Mayer focuses with Lumi on a familiar area for her. Among other things, she was the twentieth employee of Google and was known as an effective leader of consumer products. She was in charge of several large Google products, including the search engine, Gmail and Maps.

In 2012, Mayer joined Yahoo, which was in trouble at the time. Mayer tried to rebuild Yahoo services. In the end, however, this did not turn out to be enough to save the company. Mayer left Yahoo when the company was taken over by Verizon in 2017 for $4.5 billion.

So now she has her own startup, where, according to an expert, she is very hands-on in the process of developing the products. She comes to the office almost every day. She started the company with Enrique Muñoz Torres, a long-time colleague who previously served as senior vice president of search and advertising at Yahoo and product manager at Google.