A deal that has happened in secret has been uncovered. The Danish company Spektral was in 2017 bought by Apple. The purchase is said to have taken place in late 2017, but both parties haven’t commented any further on the business deal. It has been stated that Apple bought the company for an estimated € 26 million.
Rumors of the deal started to surface last week, in Danish financial newspaper Børsen and Rapidus in Sweden, without confirmation from Apple. TechCrunch reached out to Apple, which last week confirmed with it’s standard statement
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
The company was first called Cloudcutout and has since the companies launch specialised in creating algorithms that automatically cut people from the background out of photos. Since 2016 they have also developed the software for making it possible to do the same in videos. Applications can be for example within Augmented Reality. The companies key employees have moved to Cupertino to work in ”computational imaging” at Apple.
It is not the first time Apple has bought a company in this region: Skåne based startups like Polar Rose and Algo Trim have both been acquired by Apple previously, and also then key employees also have moved to Cupertino to work for Apple, but nowadays Apple also has a team based in Malmö, rumoured to be more over 100 people.
