Wavii

» see wavii.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

wavii was a seattle startup that adrian aoun founded in 2008 and kept in stealth for nearly four years. the team was heavy on former last.fm and microsoft engineers with some amazon alumni mixed in. what they were quietly building was an nlp pipeline that would scrape the open web, identify events (person did thing on date at place), turn them into short structured summaries, and let users follow those summaries by topic rather than by publisher.

the public beta arrived in april 2012. an iphone app followed in november 2012 as the company pivoted mobile-first. by early 2013 wavii was one of a small cluster of "ai news summarization" startups that also included nick d'aloisio's summly. both were about the same age, both had raised similar amounts, both were pitching the same reader problem.

google announced the wavii acquisition on 26 april 2013 for figures publicly undisclosed but reported by allthingsd and techcrunch as north of thirty million. the wavii app and website went dark that week. the team relocated from seattle to google's mountain view campus to work on natural language research inside the knowledge graph organization. yahoo bought summly the same season for a similar figure and killed it the same way. twin acquihires, twin shutdowns, both dated april 2013.

i did not use wavii. i was reading techmeme and hacker news every morning in ankara during the 2012-2013 window, so i saw both the summly and wavii acquihires flash across headlines within weeks of each other. what stuck with me was less the products (i never installed either) and more the shape of the pattern: buy the ml team, close the consumer app, port the tech into an established platform. that pattern has run continuously through the 2020s ai-lab acquihires.

~ the case file ~

~ the product ~

the wavii web app had a feed of cards. each card was one event: an acquisition, a hire, a game result, a policy change. the card carried a headline, the structured facts (who, what, when, where), and links back to the source articles the summary had been derived from. you subscribed to topics (companies, sports teams, celebrities, industries) and your feed populated from whatever the pipeline had detected that day.

the ios app compressed the same idea into a phone. mobile changed the interaction: instead of scrolling a full feed you got push notifications for high-priority events on your followed topics. the geekwire beta review in april 2012 read like a tech product that felt useful for tracking a specific narrow topic (say, one company or one sport) and less useful for general news reading.

~ the acquihire ~

google was buying nlp teams in 2013 as prep for the deeper personalization layer that eventually became google now, and later the assistant. wavii's pipeline (facts extracted from open web content into a structured knowledge base) mapped directly onto the knowledge graph roadmap. the acquisition price of "north of $30 million" was almost entirely for the team, not the product.

aoun stayed at google for a few years, then left in 2016 to found forward, a healthcare startup with concierge clinics. the wavii tech disappeared inside google without a clean product credit. bits of it likely showed up in google now event cards and later in discover.

~ the twin ~

summly and wavii were sold within weeks of each other in march-april 2013, at almost identical reported prices, to yahoo and google respectively. both were killed within days of announcement. both teams got moved and folded. the summly case became famous because d'aloisio was seventeen. the wavii case did not get the age-story hook, so it faded faster. as historical objects they are essentially the same event, and both were early markers of what the 2020s ai-lab acquihire wave would industrialize.

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