- The acquisition seems to have taken place in January
- Large chunks of the WaveOne team has been folded under Apple
- AI-powered video decompression works to make streaming better amongst other things
Apple acquired California based start-up WaveOne, that was working on AI-powered video compression, reports TechCrunch. Apple did not respond to their request for comment but when they investigated, WaveOne’s website ceased to exist and some of their employees have been folded under Apple’s Machine Learning division.
WaveOne’s co-founder, Oren Rippel also works at Apple since February 2023.
Bob Stankosh, the company’s former VP of Sales posted on LinkedIn a month ago about the sale.
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.
Bob Stankosh, WaveOne’s former VP of Sales
The two cofounders of Wave One, Oren Rippel and Lubomir Bourdev, worked on Meta’s computer vision team prior to founding WaveOne in 2016.
WaveOne’s prowess was “content aware” video decompression with Ai-powered scene and object detection; for example, it would know to prioritize faces over other objects in a video when there was a need to save bandwidth. The company claimed it could cut the size of video files in half.
It is not clear what Apple plans to do with this acquisition but more efficient video streaming is an option. There is also no insight into how much they paid to acquire the startup or when we might see the benefits of the acquisition. We do know that Apple is looking for Machine Learning video engineers based on the recruitment post by Oren Rippel.
