Sunshine Contacts is an invite-only address book app from Marissa Mayer’s new startup

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has just revealed her first major product since stepping down back in 2017: a new contact management application for iOS devices called Sunshine Contacts.

Sunshine Contacts is the first product from Mayer’s Sunshine startup (previously known as Lumi Labs), and it promises to be “the world’s most advanced, intuitive contact manager.”

Sunshine’s goal is to unify and simplify your contacts across Apple’s Contacts app and Gmail, pulling down your data from those sources and combining it with publicly available information. At the same time, the app promises to help organize and clean up your contacts, filling in missing chunks of information, and deleting duplicate entries. Then, it can sync that information back to your contact app and help continue to keep it updated over time.

Sunshine also offers more granular settings for sharing contacts, allowing users to share more specific personal information (for close friends) for more general information, or a professional card that includes less information for business contacts.

These are all good ideas, but Sunshine is by no means the first app to try to figure out a better way to manage contacts. There was Cobook in 2012, Brewster in 2014, FullContact in 2015, Cardhop in 2017 — just to name a few. It’s not entirely clear what Sunshine is offering here that past efforts at simplifying and unifying contacts haven’t done in the past.

The company doesn’t need to figure that out now. Sunshine Contacts is launching as a free service, and while there are plans to offer more premium paid features down the line, there’s no real downside in trying it out, assuming you can get in. Right now, the app is launching as an invite-only service (taking a page from other buzzy startups, like Superhuman), so Sunshine will be able to closely manage how many users it has to support.

While a contact syncing service might seem to be a little small for Mayer’s first post-Yahoo project, Sunshine’s goals are beyond just one app: in an interview with Wired, Mayer says that the company hopes to create a suite of “smart, small-scale sharing” products over time, of which Sunshine Contacts is expected to just be the start.

Update November 18th, 5:25pm: Lumi Labs — the former name of Mayer’s startup — has been renamed to Sunshine alongside the launch of the app.