• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 27, 2023

WaveOne, founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Ripple, has been acquired by Apple. The startup was developing artificial intelligence algorithms for video compression.

TechCrunch reported it on Monday, but the sale happened early this year, with Bob Stankosh, WaveOne VP of sales, making the announcement on LinkedIn.

“After almost 2 years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning/deep learning video technology could potentially change the world.”

Evidently, Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio. 

WaveOne was working on video compression and decompression algorithms to reduce the size of video files. “Video codecs are built with deep thought and well-engineered components, but they are hard-coded,” reports Marktechpost.com in 2022. “As a result, it is difficult to adapt to the expanding demand and diverse video use cases, including social media sharing, object identification, VR streaming, etc.”

Learned video compression can help reduce latency. Marktechpost.com notes it is an end-to-end learning-based video compression approach that can outperform existing video codecs. It presents several contributions to video compression with machine learning.