Apple acquires AI startup founded by former NotebookLM developers

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act transparency website lists Huxe as Apple’s latest acquisition and at least the fourth AI-related deal disclosed this year. Here are the details.

Apple’s latest AI deal involves former NotebookLM developers

In mid-2025, a team of three developers who worked on Google’s NotebookLM announced Huxe, their own custom AI audio app that could generate daily briefings from a user’s email and calendar, create podcast-style conversations on specific topics, and provide continually updated audio feeds for topics like news and sports.

NotebookLM, recently renamed Gemini Notebook, is one of Google’s most popular AI products to date. It started as an experimental research and note-taking tool designed to answer questions and generate summaries based on a user’s own documents, and has grown into a broader AI research assistant, capable of creating podcast-style audio overviews, video summaries, study materials, and more.

In December 2024, as NotebookLM grew in popularity, project manager Raiza Martin left Google to found a new company, alongside two former NotebookLM colleagues: designer Jason Spielman and engineer Stephen Hughes.

They officially launched Huxe by invitation only in June 2025 and opened it to everyone in September, alongside the announcement of a $4.6 million funding round.

Huxe continued to develop its product until May 2026, when the company announced its closure. The service ended on May 28. At the time, the company’s website said only that the team was “moving on to new things.”

Today, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act Transparency Database revealed that Apple reached the following agreement with Huxe and informed the bloc last June:

06/09/2026 Huxe
Apple Inc. (“Apple”) will have the right to make offers of employment and hire certain employees of Huxe AI, Inc. (“Huxe”) and to receive a non-exclusive license to Huxe’s intellectual property rights. Huxe offers a mobile app that creates personalized audio content. Apple designs, manufactures and markets smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearable devices and accessories, and sells a variety of related services.

In other words, this is not an outright acquisition of the company, but rather a now-common acquisition-and-hiring structure in which a large company hires key employees and gains access to some of the startup’s technology without purchasing the company itself.

While there are no details on what Apple plans to do with Huxe’s technology or which employees it intends to hire, the deal fits Apple’s pattern of recent AI acquisitions and acquisitions of AI companies developing new ways for people and devices to interact through voice, vision and other interfaces.

The acquisitions have been criticized for potentially allowing large technology companies to bypass traditional merger reviews.

Earlier this year, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said the agency was beginning to take a close look at such arrangements, and in March the FTC and the Justice Department formally began considering changes to pre-merger reporting rules that could specifically address acquisitions, reverse acquisitions, and transactions involving non-exclusive intellectual property licenses.

There has been little public movement on this specific issue since then.