Marissa Mayer Is Dissolving Her Sunshine Startup Lab

Sunshine, the consumer AI startup founded by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2018, has seen brighter days.

The small startup is shutting down, and its assets are being sold to a new entity incorporated by Mayer called Dazzle, according to an email viewed by WIRED. Mayer sent the email to Sunshine shareholders on September 17, informing them that Dazzle has officially incorporated and is ready to acquire Sunshine’s holdings.

The deal requires approval from shareholders, including Sunshine cofounder Enrique Muñoz Torres, Norwest Venture Partners, Felicis Partners, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the PR firm Archetype Agency, and others. As of Sunday afternoon, 99 percent of shareholders had signed, according to sources close to the situation. Mayer is the company's largest shareholder and investor.

The email did not elaborate on what Dazzle’s purpose will be, but sources tell WIRED that Mayer is eyeing a new kind of AI personal assistant. Sunshine’s roughly 15 employees are expecting to find new roles at Dazzle, sources say.

“After careful consideration, Sunshine’s management, and 99.99% of its shareholders, determined the strongest path forward for the company was to sell to Dazzle AI, a new company already incorporated and with committed funding,” Mayer said through a spokesperson. “As Sunshine’s largest investor, shareholder, and CEO, Marissa is proud of what the team built and looks forward to carrying that momentum into new opportunities around Dazzle.”

Mayer founded Sunshine, originally called Lumi Labs, in 2018 after her five-year turnaround attempt at Yahoo. Prior to becoming CEO of Yahoo, Mayer had a storied career at Google, where she was employee number 20. Mayer designed the interface for Google Search and helped develop Google Maps and Google AdWords.

The idea for Sunshine’s first product, an app for managing contacts, stemmed from Mayer’s own experience tapping into her deep network of Silicon Valley luminaries as she was trying to launch her company. That app, Sunshine Contacts, launched in 2020. By that point, the startup had raised $20 million in venture capital funding, in addition to Mayer’s personal contributions.

Early on, the Sunshine app was plagued by complaints that it potentially violated user privacy. The app, which used AI to identify and merge duplicate people in your phone’s contacts list, was also pulling in information from Whitepages to automatically add home addresses to contacts.

In 2024, Sunshine launched a photo sharing app called Shine. Like Sunshine Contacts, Shine was widely viewed as a flop.