- Apple Inc AAPL has quietly snapped U.S. startup WaveOne, which was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.
- WaveOne shut down its website around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne's co-founders, joined Apple's various machine learning groups, TechCrunch reports.
- The financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
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- WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the deal in a LinkedIn post a month back.
- Meta' Platforms Inc META former AI officials Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel founded WaveOne in 2016.
- WaveOne's main innovation was a "content-aware" video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs.
- WaveOne said its hardware-agnostic approach could reduce the size of video files by as much as half, with better gains in more complex scenes.
- Before the Apple acquisition, WaveOne drew $9 million from backers, including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners, and Blue Ivy.
- In 2022, Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL DeepMind acclimated a machine learning algorithm leading to a 4% reduction in the video-sharing service's data needs to stream to users.
- Apple held $51.4 billion in cash and equivalents as of December 31.
- Price Action: AAPL shares traded lower by 0.95% at $158.74 on the last check Monday.
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