Apple just spent 2 billion on an AI company you’ve probably never heard of

In a major move, Apple has just confirmed to Reuters its purchase of Q.ai, an Israel-based artificial intelligence startup company. Q.ai consists of one hundred employees, all of which are set to join forces with the California-based tech giant.

Q.ai “is a remarkable company that is pioneering new and creative ways to use imaging and machine learning,” says Apple senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, in a statement to Reuters.

While Apple hasn’t provided any details regarding the financial side of the deal, sources tell the Financial Times that the acquisition measures in at close to two billion dollars. If this figure is correct, it would make the Q.ai purchase the second-biggest in all of Apple’s history, only outdone by the company’s three billion dollar purchase of Beats Electronics back in 2014.

Interestingly, Q.ai CEO Aviad Maizels, who will be remaining a part of the team post-acquisition, previously sold 3D sensing company PrimeSense to Apple back in 2013, as confirmed by AllThingsD. PrimeSense’s technology was used in the Microsoft Kinect, later being adapted to help facilitate FaceID development for the iPhone X.

“Joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we’ve created, and we’re thrilled to bring these experiences to people everywhere,” says Maizels in a separate statement to Reuters.

Apple Intelligence is on the line

It’s unclear if Apple will be able to catch up with Google and OpenAI

For the time being, it’s anyone’s guess as to how Apple will leverage Q.ai once the purchase is said and done. Based on the reportedly gargantuan acquisition cost, the startup likely holds a great deal of talent, AI prowess, and perhaps even patented technologies that Apple has its eyes on.

Apple’s internal AI efforts, marketed to the public under the Apple Intelligence moniker, have been marred by delays, controversies, internal scuffles, and even lawsuits. This has since culminated in the company officially signing on to use Google’s Gemini AI technologies for the long-awaited Siri revamp we expect to see arrive on iPhone later this year.

Back during a Q3 earnings call in July 2025, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated on record that the company is “open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap” and that it’s “significantly growing out investments” (via CNBC). Scooping up Q.ai is certainly in line with this statement, and, at least to me, it signals that Apple isn’t ready to bow out of the AI arms race anytime soon.

Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are arguably the two biggest fish in the AI sea, with Apple’s longstanding focus on customer privacy standing at direct odds with the data-hungry nature of large language models (LLMs) and other such AI technologies. If Apple wants to control the AI stack from top-to-bottom, then it needs all the help it can get — and so perhaps this Q.ai acquisition is symbolic of Apple putting its money where its mouth is.