Apple has added one other AI startup to its acquisition list, Canada-based DarwinAI. The company focuses on visionary technology to watch components during manufacturing to enhance efficiency. Bloomberg reported.
Although Apple or DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup team joined Apple's machine learning teams in January LinkedIn Profiles.
DarwinAI had raised over $15 million in funding in various rounds from investors including BDC Capital's Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures and Inovia Capital. BDC Capital confirms on its website that it has received an exit from DarwinAI, while Obvious Venture has updated its portfolio to reflect the startup's acquisition.
BDC Capital and Obvious Venture didn’t comment on the story on the time of writing. Apple didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
As Bloomberg noted in its report, DarwinAI not only contributes to production efficiency but additionally uses techniques to create AI models smaller and faster. This may very well be useful for on-device generative AI features that Apple plans to introduce in iOS 18 this 12 months.
Compared to competitors like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft, Apple lags behind in releasing Gen AI-powered features. In February, Tim Cook said the corporate planned to introduce such features “later this 12 months.”
“We proceed to speculate an incredible amount of effort and time and stay up for sharing the small print of our ongoing work on this area later this 12 months,” Cook said during a quarterly conference call with analysts.
Last 12 months, Apple's top executive confirmed investments in genetic AI efforts. Apple's job postings indicate that the corporate is exploring adopting AI in several internal and external areas, including Siri, developer tools and customer support.
