Apple Hires Huxe Team and Licences Its Audio Technology

Jakarta (ANTARA) – Apple has reportedly reached an agreement to offer jobs to several members of Huxe, a personalised-audio start-up team, and to licence the company’s intellectual property.

As first reported by MacRumors, Apple disclosed in a filing submitted to the European Commission that it had agreed to make job offers to “certain employees of Huxe AI” and “receive a non-exclusive licence to Huxe’s intellectual property rights”.

According to a TechCrunch report on Saturday (10 October), the deal is known as a reverse acqui-hire. The arrangement allows a large company to recruit key team members and obtain a licence to a start-up’s technology without directly acquiring the company.

Such deals are also sometimes referred to simply as acqui-hires.

Huxe was founded by developers who had previously worked on the AI-powered podcast feature in NotebookLM, which was recently renamed Gemini Notebook.

“The team is moving on to new things, and we will not continue developing the product,” the company said.

Huxe also thanked users for using the app, recommending it to friends, and sending feedback and ideas. The company said users’ involvement made them feel as though they were building the product together.

The filing reportedly did not identify who received job offers or whether they accepted them. It also did not disclose Apple’s plans for the deal.

The announcement that Huxe was shutting down came a day after Spotify introduced an AI-powered podcast creation feature. Apple may be looking to bring a similar function to its Podcasts app.

However, it remains unclear how many listeners want personalised audio to replace conventional podcasts, an idea that appears to have caught the attention of technology executives—and could even replace interactions between parents and children.