Apple has made an acquisition in the artificial intelligence space, as first spotted by TechCrunch. The report says Apple “quietly” acquired the Mountain View-based company WaveOne, a startup that was “developing AI algorithms for compressing video.”
Apple didn’t confirm the acquisition, but WaveOne executive Bob Stankosh revealed the news in a post on LinkedIn:
After almost 2 years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple. We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning/deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio. I want to thank my co-founders, Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel as well as Craig Lytle for helping to bring the idea to market and advancing this concept for commercial applications.
WaveOne described itself as “building the next generation of compression of digital media. The company says it is “leveraging the latest advancements in machine learning and deep learning to create custom-tailored, context-dependent solutions.” One of its primary innovations was something called “content-aware video compression and decompression,” which “could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones,” TechCrunch says.
According to the company’s Crunchbase profile page, it had between two and 10 employees at the time of the acquisition and had raised $9 million in funding.
TechCrunch adds that WaveOne’s website was taken offline in January, as is customary following an Apple acquisition. Some of the company’s employees are also now working on machine learning teams at Apple.
There are a number of different ways Apple could incorporate this technology into its own products, ranging from iCloud and Photos storage management to streaming video and much more.
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