Snips
2013 - 2019, 7 years old
A privacy-first voice assistant platform that ran entirely on-device, pitched to hardware makers as an alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant.
Snips was founded in Paris in 2013 by Rand Hindi, Mael Primet, and Michael Fester to build a voice assistant that ran on the device itself and sent nothing to the cloud, an architecture that read as either principled or quixotic depending on the year. It raised about 21 million dollars and built a developer platform that let gadget makers add private voice control without Amazon or Google in the loop. In November 2019 Sonos bought the company for 37.5 million dollars and within weeks shut the developer console, ending anyone's ability to build or run Snips voice systems. Sonos wanted the team and the on-device technology for its own music controls, not the platform, and the platform went dark. The privacy pitch that made Snips distinctive was absorbed into a speaker company and stopped being a product anyone else could use.
- Founded
- 2013-01
- Shut down
- 2019-12-03
- Funding raised
- $21M
- Years alive
- 7
- Founders
- Rand Hindi, Mael Primet, Michael Fester
Sources
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