Apple secretly purchases Israel AI camera tech startup

Apple has secretly acquired Israeli startup Camerai, a company developing camera technology, according to Israeli financial website Calcalist.

The Israeli company was reported to have been quietly sold to the US tech giant a year and a half ago for several tens of millions of dollars, and was folded into Apple’s computer vision team.

In 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced at a Berkshire Hathaway conference that the company had acquired 25 companies that year, without disclosing further details.

Founded in 2014, Camerai was formerly known as Tipit. The startup uses artificial intelligence to enable cameras to better understand scenes and build AR graphics which interface with those technologies in real-time.

The majority of Camerai’s employees have joined Apple’s research and development team, based in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, according to Calcalist.

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A spokesman for Apple in Israel declined to comment, reported The Times of Israel.

Last month, pro-Palestine activists launched an online campaign calling on Google and Apple to put Palestine on their maps, accusing the internet giants of erasing Palestinian identity and changing facts to suit US and Israeli objectives.

“According to Google, Palestine does not exist,” a change.org petition with over one million signatories stated.

The petition was initially launched in 2016, but gained significant momentum last month.

Israel captured and occupied the West Bank, the Gaza strip and the Golan Heights during the 1967 war. Monitoring groups confirm that there are more than 130 Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite being considered illegal under international law.