Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. Apple wouldn't confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne's website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne's co-founders, now work within Apple's various machine learning groups. WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago. "After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple," Stankosh wrote.

Apple has acquired a company called WaveOne, which develops AI algorithms to compress videos. Although Apple didn't confirm the sale, former employees of WaveOne have stated that they are now working in various machine-learning groups at Apple. WaveOne's key innovation was a'content-aware' video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on AI accelerators built into many mobile phones and a growing number of PCs. WaveOne also claimed that its video compression technology is robust against sudden disconnections and that its hardware-agnostic approach could cut video file sizes by up to half, resulting in better effects in more complex scenes. Ahead of the Apple acquisition, WaveOne received $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners, and Blue Ivy.

Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. From a report:Apple wouldn't confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne's website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne's co-founders, now work within Apple's various machine learning groups. In a LinkedIn post published a month ago, WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale. "After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple," Stankosh wrote.

Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. Apple wouldn't confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne's website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne's co-founders, now work within Apple's various machine learning groups. In a LinkedIn post published a month ago, WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale. "After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple," Stankosh wrote.

"LIDAR is a fool's errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it's ridiculous, you'll see." Tesla's approach to driverless vehicle technology has been controversial at best.

Video has worked the same way for a long, long time. And because of its unique qualities, video has been largely immune to the machine learning explosion upending industry after industry. WaveOne hopes to change that by taking the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and making them AI-powered -- while somehow avoiding the pitfalls that would-be codec revolutionizers and "AI-powered" startups often fall into. The startup has until recently limited itself to showing its results in papers and presentations, but with a recently raised $6.5M seed round, they are ready to move towards testing and deploying their actual product. It's no niche: video compression may seem a bit in the weeds to some, but there's no doubt it's become one of the most important processes of the modern internet.

A eureka moment struck, recalls Mr. Rippel. "Hey, hold on, we could do this for real." The two Ph.D.s quickly decided to try in reality what HBO's fictitious startup was trying on screen. Ever since, the pair of Facebook Inc. alums-turned-startup founders have been living a case of life imitating art imitating life. HBO's comedy series, which began its run in 2014, tells the story of scrappy startup Pied Piper, which hits on a brilliant algorithm for compressing information so it can zip through the pipes of the internet more quickly.