Screenshot from Mayday, the scheduling calendar app that Apple purchased whereas it was nonetheless in beta — picture credit score: Mayday Labs
Apple has been quietly shopping for AI corporations whose work suggests the corporate is trying to convey Apple Intelligence to chatbots, particular person customers’ calendars, and maybe to its personal manufacturing.
Information of Apple buying an organization often solely breaks if Apple decides to announce it — because it did withPrimephonic, the premise for Apple Music Classical — or if the scale of the deal requires regulatory oversight. Far more usually, it acquires very many corporations and absorbs their merchandise and employees.
Now, as noticed by French website MacGeneration, Apple has needed to declare a number of latest acquisitions to European regulators beneath the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and 4 are particularly firms working in AI.
The 4 are very wide-ranging, and Apple has not needed to announce what it plans to do with their know-how. However one of many firms, Mayday, was making an AI-powered calendar, process supervisor and what its makers referred to as a scheduling assistant for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Canadian agency Mayday Labs was purchased by Apple on March 3, 2024, and its web site says the product was “sundown on Might 1, 2024.” A beta of the corporate’s app that was stay on the time has been withdrawn, however the web site stays stay.
That website does set out what Mayday was meant to do, which was mainly to behave as a calendar that intelligently helped schedule each occasions and duties.
“With AI-Schedule Duties, merely add your todo’s, and Mayday will deal with the remaining,” it says. “Utilizing our Superb Time Scheduling Engine, Mayday leverages its understanding of your working fashion to recommend the optimum time to give attention to that process, routinely blocking out a slot in your calendar.”
It is simple to see Apple integrating these instruments into future variations of its personal Calendar and Reminders apps. It is also simple to see busy folks preferring to not depart their process listing to AI.
Apple did launch a brand new calendar app in February 2025 that was to do with scheduling group occasions. That was Invitations, although, which was particularly for producing single occasions at a time.
Massive Brother AI
One other AI firm acquired by Apple is Drishti, but it surely’s one which hopefully few customers will ever see. For Drishti is a Sanskrit phrase which means gaze or level of focus, specific in yoga, and this know-how was meant for use simply in manufacturing.
It is spectacular and scary on the identical time. When a person similar to an Apple assist individual provides Drishti the serial variety of an iPhone, the app shows video footage of that precise cellphone being assembled within the manufacturing unit.
In addition to mainly seeing which employee accountable for an issue as soon as it has been noticed, Drishti additionally has a component to play throughout manufacture. The corporate beforehand demonstrated its AI system monitoring the manufacturing of a automotive and recognizing errors on the meeting line.
Element from a Drishti demonstration displaying its AI methods monitoring manufacturing unit work — picture credit score: Drishti
One other of the AI corporations acquired by Apple may slot in with Drishti at this level, too, because it’s about visualizing giant quantities of information. Betteromics, based mostly in Redwood, California, was acquired on December 20, 2024, and is constructed significantly for analyzing well being knowledge.
Betteromics raised $20 million in funding, simply over a yr earlier than Apple purchased it.
A future with chatbots
It is beforehand been reported that Apple has been engaged on a Siri chatbot, which can launch in 2026 as a part of iOS 19. Now that rumor appears extra sure, due to the final of the 4 AI corporations Apple is understood to have latest acquired.
That agency is Pointable, which was purchased by Apple on January 3, 2025.
There’s little or no element accessible about Pointable, as its official web site seems to have been eliminated. However listings on LinkedIn say that it was used for getting “production-grade RAG [Retrieval-Augmented Generation] and brokers in weeks, not months.”
RAG considerations enhancing Massive Language Fashions [LLMs] by connecting them to exterior knowledge sources to retrieve stay, present info.
The listing goes on
It isn’t at present clear whether or not the DMA requires all acquisitions to be made public, or whether or not there’s something within the measurement or utility of those corporations that required it.
However it’s sure that they’re simply probably the most just lately found acquisitions in AI. Regardless that Apple radically lower down its price of acquisitions throughout COVID, it nonetheless stored shopping for companies.
In addition to these newly revealed ones, Apple has beforehand purchased DarwinAI, which makes deep neural networks smaller and extra environment friendly. That was in March 2024, after which in April it was revealed that Apple had purchased the French agency, which was particularly for know-how to get LLMs and AI processing onto the iPhone.
