Patrick Gates — an Apple senior director of engineering who led development of iCloud, FaceTime, and iMessage during nearly 14 years at the the tech giant — has left to join a stealth startup founded by two other former Apple employees, notes The Information.
The startup, called Human, announced that Gates had joined as chief technology officer on Dec. 19. A Silicon Valley veteran, he did research at Sun Microsystems and built developer frameworks at NeXT before his time at Apple.
Humane was co-founded by former Apple directors Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The company’s website says it’s working on products that focus on “the next shift between humans and computing.”