Last month, Humane, a stealth startup founded by two ex-Apple executives, announced that Patrick Gates, a longtime Apple cloud services engineer, had joined the company as chief technology officer.
Gates leaves Apple after 13 years of service, during which he was instrumental in the development of products such as iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime. In December, Gates joined Apple veterans Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno as the company’s chief technology officer.
Chaudhri and Bongiorno wrote on Humane’s website, “Patrick is a critical partner in assembling a world-class team of proven innovators and experts to build the next shift between humans and computing.” Together, we have a history of developing innovative products and solutions, and we are thrilled to be able to continue this at Humane.
The blog post, which went unnoticed for approximately two weeks, was discovered on Thursday by The Information.
At Apple, Gates oversaw a significant internal initiative aimed at consolidating existing cloud services such as iTunes, Siri, and Apple Maps on a single core platform based on Siri’s cloud infrastructure. The Siri team, led by Bill Gates, and the iCloud team, led by Eric Billingsley, were reportedly embroiled in political infighting during this endeavor.
When Billingsley left Apple last October, Gates assumed control of the iCloud infrastructure, but the unification initiative stalled.
Gates conducted research at Sun Microsystems and created developer frameworks at NeXT before joining Apple.
Humane is currently in stealth mode, but the company claims to be working on the “next shift between humans and computing.” Given Chaudhri and Bongiorno’s work at Apple, it is probable that the company is developing products and services associated with next-generation user interface design.
