Apple acqui-hires AI startup founded by former NotebookLM developers

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

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

NotebookLM, which was recently renamed as 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 grew into a broader AI research assistant capable of creating podcast-style Audio Overviews, video summaries, study materials, and more.

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

They formally launched Huxe on an invite-only basis in June 2025, and opened it to everyone that September, alongside the announcement of a $4.6 million funding round.

Huxe continued developing its product until May 2026, when the company announced it was shutting down. 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 has struck the following deal with Huxe, and informed the bloc last June:

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

Although there are no details about 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 acqui-hires of AI companies developing new ways for people and devices to interact through voice, vision, and other interfaces.

Acqui-hires have been criticized for potentially allowing large tech companies to sidestep traditional merger reviews.

Earlier this year, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said the agency was beginning to look closely at such arrangements, and in March, the FTC and Justice Department formally began considering changes to premerger reporting rules that could specifically address acqui-hires, reverse acqui-hires, and deals involving non-exclusive IP licenses.

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