Apple Secretly Acquires WaveOne, AI Startup To Compress Videos

Apple acquired a video compressing AI startup (photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Apple secretly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, which develops AI algorithms to compress videos.

Although Apple did not say anything, this acquisition was directly mentioned by former WaveOne's head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, in LinkedIn's post some time ago.

"After almost two years on WaveOne, last week we finished selling the company to Apple. We started our journey on WaveOne, realizing that in-depth machine learning video technology has the potential to change the world," Stankosh wrote in the post.

Founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, WaveOne took a video codec paradigm that was decades old and made it AI-powered.

Launching TechCrunch, WaveOne's main innovation is a video compression and decompression algorithm that can run on AI accelerators installed on many phones and more and more PCs.

Using AI-powered scenes and object detection, this startup technology can basically "understand" video frames, allowing them, for example, to prioritize faces at the expense of other elements in a scene to save bandwidth.

"Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio. I want to thank one of my founders, Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel and Craig Lytle for helping bring ideas to market and advancing this concept to commercial applications."

It's not clear what Apple wants by acquiring WaveOne, it could be to provide higher image resolution and frequency on its streaming service like Apple TV.