The Canadian business DarwinAI, which focuses on vision-based tech to monitor components throughout manufacturing in order to increase productivity, has been added to Apple's list of AI acquisitions, according to Bloomberg.
Although neither Apple nor DarwinAI have made an official announcement regarding the acquisition, some DarwinAI employees reportedly joined Apple's machine learning departments in January.
Among the investors that contributed to DarwinAI's $15 million in fundraising were Inovia Capital, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and BDC Capital's Deep Tech Venture Fund.
Obvious Venture has revised its holdings to reflect the acquisition of DarwinAI, while BDC Capital has verified on its website that it has received an exit from the startup.
As of this writing, neither BDC Capital nor Obvious Venture had commented on the story. When asked for comment, Apple did not immediately answer.
In addition to assisting with industrial efficiency, DarwinAI employs methods to reduce the size and speed of AI models, as pointed out in Bloomberg's study. Apple plans to bring on-device generative AI tools in iOS 18 this year, and this could be handy for them.
When compared to rivals like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, Apple has been slow to release features powered by generation AI. This is something that Apple CEO Tim Cook said in February as something that will be released "later this year."
“We continue to spend a huge amount of time and effort and we're thrilled to release the details of our ongoing work in that arena later this year," Cook said during a quarterly earnings call with analysts.
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