Apple Snaps AI Startup WaveOne Specializing In Compressing Videos

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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