Google swallowed up another startup on Monday: Timeful, an intelligent calendar and time management app.
The deal comes less than a year after Timeful launched. And it's not the first time the guy behind the company has sold a startup to Google.
Yoav Shoham, who is the co-founder and Chairman of Timeful, sold another startup to Google in 2011.
That last company was called Katango, and was an app to help organize friends on social networks. The company raised $5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, and Google folded it into its then-new Google+ social network.
Shoham is an expert in artificial intelligence and a computer science professor at Stanford University, where Google was created in the late 1990s and which is not far from Google's headquarters. The bio on his Stanford page says that he "has worked in various areas of AI, including temporal reasoning, nonmonotonic logics and theories of commonsense."
He stayed at Google as a part-time employee until 2014, according to his LinkedIn bio which describes his role during the period as "trying to do no harm, and maybe even bring value."
His latest company, Timeful, uses technology to help consumers manage their time. As Business Insider wrote in August, the app takes note of "your scheduling behaviors and intelligently suggest a time that's right for you that makes Timeful unique." Timeful also hired LinkedIn data scientist Gloria Lau back in October.
That technology could come in handy for Google, which has been developing a lot of similar "predictive" features with its Google Now service. The deal was announced on Google's Gmail blog, but Google did not say how much it paid for Timeful.
Timeful raised $7 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, according to Crunchbase.
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.
