Knight Foundation backed Mobile sensor startup, Behav.io declared on Friday, April 12 that they are going to join Google, which is where its co-founder and CEO, Nadav Aharony used to work before he had started his company. The team behind the startup has made this decision after shutting down their alpha program that uses phones to keep track of human behaviour in the real world. The Behav.io team did not give out any details regarding their future plans or what exactly they will do after joining Google but considering their past work it seems that the search giant might work on a similar kind of project that the startup was already working on. Affirming the news Google said that Behav.io team would soon join them but it is not a formal acquisition because the startup has already shut down their project.
Here is what the announcement reads:
“We are very excited to announce that the Behavio team is now a part of Google! At Behavio, we have always been passionate about helping people better understand the world around them. We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.”
Backer Knight Foundation has granted $335,000 to the by-product of MIT Media Lab (Behav.io) during a funding round that was carried out back in June 2012, as Behav.io was looking to make communities better by using data that is gathered through mobile phones. At that time, explaining about its goals and its plans with the funding Behav.io said that it “wants to open access to, and help make sense of, the data routinely collected by mobile phones. Their open source Android platform turns phones into smart sensors of people’s real world behaviours and surroundings:
How people use their phones, how they communicate with others, and environmental factors like sound, light and motion. As a result, Behavio can understand trends and behavior changes in individuals as well as entire communities, and help them understand and make use of this information.”
As far as co-founder and CEO of Behav.io Aharony is concerned, Google is not a new company for him, because after working at MIT Media Lab the entrepreneur joined the Mountain View-based company, where he was appointed as the product manager for Android between 2011 and 2012.
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