Mountain View, California — Although Google and Apple continue to find themselves on odds, but search engine leader’s quest for window-shopping for high-tech acquisitions has reportedly netted the company yet another asset. Google has reportedly acquired “Agnilux,” a San Jose-based startup that was formed by former executives and workers from PA Semi, according to PEHub.
The news was first announced on PEHub. “We are pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we do not have any additional information to share right now,” a Google spokesperson said.
The San Jose-based startup constitute of former Apple employees, including several former P. A. Semi employees who broke away from Apple shortly after the iPhone maker absorbed the fables chip design firm for $278 million roughly two years ago.
A recent report indicates that PA Semi founder and CEO Dan Dobberpuhl was the most recent deserter from the team that had subsequently worked for Apple. Among the group are Mark Hayter, Olof Johansson, and Todd Broch, and according to reports, others have come from both TiVo and Cisco, the latter of which was one of three companies including Microsoft and Texas Instruments that previously held strategic investment talks with Agnilux.
The startup is reportedly making some type of server. Google buying such a company could go a long way toward manifesting that for webscale data centers there is nothing like tweaking your infrastructure — from the silicon up.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the acquisition but declined further details. Meanwhile, Agnilux’s website — which never bore anything more than a street address for the firm and the meaning behind its name — was taken offline sometime in the past week.
Agnilux has remained mum regarding details of its activities, although a New York Times report indicates that the startup was focusing on server technology. According to the paper, the folks at Agnilux are just as tight-lipped as the company they defected from. “We want to make a splash,” Hayter said when interviewed in February. “We do not want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we are ready.”
However, an unidentified Agnilux employee later informed the Times that the company is actually “working on some kind of server, and that the company has a partnership in place with Cisco.” Such technology could better place Google to compete against Apple in the mobile space.
For what it is worth, the name Agnilux is derived from agni – Sanskrit for fire and lux – Latin for light.