Apple has reached an agreement to hire team members and license technology from Huxe, a personalized audio startup founded by former NotebookLM developers. The company disclosed the deal in a regulatory filing with the European Commission, according to a report by TechCrunch.
The arrangement is a reverse acqui-hire: Apple is making employment offers to certain Huxe AI employees and receiving a non-exclusive license to the startup's intellectual property rights, without acquiring Huxe outright. The filing does not say which employees received offers, whether they accepted, or what Apple plans to build with the technology.
Who founded Huxe and why it shut down
Huxe was built by developers who had previously worked on the AI-generated podcast features in NotebookLM, Google's note-taking tool recently renamed Gemini Notebook. The startup offered personalized audio, a category tech executives have pushed as a future replacement for regular podcasts.
Huxe announced on May 21 that it was shutting down. The team said it would pull its app from the Apple and Google stores, halt service and delete user data, adding that the team was moving on to new things and development would not continue. It also thanked users for their suggestions and ideas.
The shutdown came just a day after Spotify unveiled AI-powered podcast generation features of its own, which may hint at where Apple is heading.
Apple's quiet AI talent grab
Apple notified the European Commission of the deal on June 9, shortly after Huxe's shutdown announcement. The company has not commented publicly on its plans for the team or the licensed intellectual property.
Reverse acqui-hires have become a common route for big tech firms to absorb AI talent and technology without buying a startup outright, a structure that tends to draw less antitrust attention. In this case, Apple gains people who already know how to turn AI models into listenable, personalized audio.
