WaveOne, a Mountain View-based startup working on AI video compression algorithms, has been quietly acquired by Apple. When contacted for comment, Apple declined to confirm the sale. However, WaveOne’s website was taken down in January, and several former staff members, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, are now employed by different machine learning teams at Apple.
Bob Stankosh, who was WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, revealed the sale in a LinkedIn post from a month ago.
Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel founded WaveOne in 2016 with the goal of transforming the antiquated paradigm of video codecs into an AI-powered system. Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s AI research division before joining the company, and he and Rippel both worked on the Meta computer vision team, which was in charge of Facebook’s content moderation, visual search, and feed ranking.
When it comes to common video compression and decompression algorithms, the compression takes place on the servers of the content provider (like YouTube), while the decompression is handled by the computers of the end users. Although it’s a good strategy, advancements are slow to spread because new codecs need hardware designed to speed up compression or decompression.
The main advancement made by WaveOne was a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm that could be utilised by PCs, smartphones, and an increasing number of tablets with AI accelerators.
The startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame by utilising AI-powered scene and object detection, which allowed it to, for example, prioritise faces over other scene elements in order to conserve bandwidth.
Additionally, WaveOne asserted that its video compression technology was resistant to unanticipated connectivity outages. The video wouldn’t freeze when bandwidth suddenly became limited because it could make a “best guess” based on the bits it had available. Instead, it would display less detail for the duration.
WaveOne asserted that its method, which was independent of hardware, could cut the size of video files in half, with better gains in more complex scenes.
Evidently, investors recognised the potential. WaveOne received $9 million in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners, and Blue Ivy prior to the Apple acquisition.
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