Google has bought aggregation and summarization startup Wavii for more than $30 million, winning a bidding war with Apple over the firm. TechCrunch is reporting that Apple wanted to integrate the company with its Siri division.
Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won. Apple wanted the company, which developed its own aggregation technology and natural summarizaton algorithms, for its Siri division. The 25-person-strong team including founder Adrian Aoun will be moving down from Seattle to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
With more than $135 billion in cash, the $30 million price tag would not have been a significant outlay for Apple, but it appears the company did not value Wavii enough to outbid Google. Wavii had raised $2 million in venture funding.
Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...
Wednesday March 18, 2026 11:56 am PDT by Juli Clover
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate versions of iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4, which means we're going to see a public launch as soon as next week. The RC versions of the software include Apple's official release notes, giving us final details on what's included in the update.
Apple Music
- Playlist Playground (beta) generates a playlist from your...
Apple has unveiled a whopping eight new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the all-new MacBook Neo, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, and now the AirPods Max 2 this week.
iPhone 17e features the same overall design as the iPhone...
It's pretty clear the $30m threshold is the point at which Apple could author their own code to match the functionality
Except Apple has proven time and time again that they're too cheap to hire more engineers to actually keep dedicated resources on projects, and instead shuffle teams around and let products wither on the vine (currently see: iWork, iLife, Aperture, etc.)