Seattle-based machine learning and artificial intelligence startup Turi has been bought by Apple in an acquisition deal worth approximately $200 million. The acquisition by the American multinational technology company is a move in its battle with Google, Amazon and Facebook in the domain of artificial intelligence (AI).

The acquisition was not directly substantiated by Apple, but it gives out the boilerplate statement it usually makes when it acquires a company. Apple stated that every now and then, the company keeps acquiring smaller technology entities, without usually revealing its aims of plans of the acquisition.

Turi is involved in assisting developers over the creation of AI solutions. The nature of acquisition is still ambiguous. It is not known whether the numerous developer tools of Turi will be accessible by the enormous group of developers of Apple, or the talent and intellectual property of the startup is the main agenda of acquisition.

The team of the startup will maintain its operations from Seattle. The Chief Executive Officer of Apple, Tim Cook, revealed during the earnings release of the company in July that the iPhone giant is making a move into AI. "We have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run", said Cook. The purchase of Turi is not the first acquisition that apple has done in the field of AI.

In 2016, the company has acquired machine learning startup Perceptio and natural language processing firm VocalIQ. The news of Turi being acquired by apple was first revealed by Geekwire. Turi was established in 2013 and provides a machine learning platform, which assists in the development of Big Data analytics for its clients, on the basis of an open source project that was initially used for the application of large-scale machine learning to graph analysis.