Screenshot from Mayday, the scheduling calendar app that Apple bought while it was still in beta — image credit: Mayday Labs
Apple has been quietly buying AI firms whose work suggests the company is looking to bring Apple Intelligence to chatbots, individual users’ calendars, and perhaps to its own manufacturing.
News of Apple acquiring a company usually only breaks if Apple decides to announce it — as it did withPrimephonic, the basis for Apple Music Classical — or if the size of the deal requires regulatory oversight. Much more often, it acquires very many firms and absorbs their products and staff.
Now, as spotted by French site MacGeneration, Apple has had to declare several recent acquisitions to European regulators under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and four are specifically companies working in AI.
The four are very wide-ranging, and Apple has not had to announce what it plans to do with their technology. But one of the companies, Mayday, was making an AI-powered calendar, task manager and what its makers called a scheduling assistant for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Canadian firm Mayday Labs was bought by Apple on March 3, 2024, and its website says the product was “sunset on May 1, 2024.” A beta of the company’s app that was live at the time has been withdrawn, but the website remains live.
That site does set out what Mayday was intended to do, which was chiefly to act as a calendar that intelligently helped schedule both events and tasks.
“With AI-Schedule Tasks, simply add your todo’s, and Mayday will take care of the rest,” it says. “Using our Ideal Time Scheduling Engine, Mayday leverages its understanding of your working style to suggest the optimal time to focus on that task, automatically blocking out a slot in your calendar.”
It’s easy to see Apple integrating these tools into future versions of its own Calendar and Reminders apps. It’s also easy to see busy people preferring not to leave their task list to AI.
Apple did launch a new calendar app in February 2025 that was to do with scheduling group events. That was Invites, though, which was specifically for producing single events at a time.
Big Brother AI
Another AI company acquired by Apple is Drishti, but it’s one that hopefully few users will ever see. For Drishti is a Sanskrit word that means gaze or point of focus, particular in yoga, and this technology was intended to be used just in manufacturing.
It’s impressive and scary at the same time. When a user such as an Apple support person gives Drishti the serial number of an iPhone, the app displays video footage of that exact phone being assembled in the factory.
As well as basically seeing which worker to blame for a problem once it’s been spotted, Drishti also has a part to play during manufacture. The company previously demonstrated its AI system monitoring the production of a car and spotting errors on the assembly line.
Detail from a Drishti demonstration showing its AI systems monitoring factory work — image credit: Drishti
Another of the AI firms acquired by Apple might fit in with Drishti at this point, too, as it’s about visualizing large amounts of data. Betteromics, based in Redwood, California, was acquired on December 20, 2024, and is built particularly for analyzing health data.
Betteromics raised $20 million in funding, just over a year before Apple bought it.
A future with chatbots
It’s previously been reported that Apple has been working on a Siri chatbot, which may launch in 2026 as part of iOS 19. Now that rumor looks more certain, because of the last of the four AI firms Apple is known to have recent acquired.
That firm is Pointable, which was bought by Apple on January 3, 2025.
There’s very little detail available about Pointable, as its official website appears to have been removed. But listings on LinkedIn say that it was used for getting “production-grade RAG [Retrieval-Augmented Generation] and agents in weeks, not months.”
RAG concerns enhancing Large Language Models [LLMs] by connecting them to external data sources to retrieve live, current information.
The list goes on
It’s not currently clear whether the DMA requires all acquisitions to be made public, or whether there is something in the size or application of these firms that required it.
But it is certain that they are just the most recently discovered acquisitions in AI. Even though Apple radically cut down its rate of acquisitions during COVID, it still kept buying businesses.
As well as these newly revealed ones, Apple has previously bought DarwinAI, which makes deep neural networks smaller and more efficient. That was in March 2024, and then in April it was revealed that Apple had bought the French firm, which was specifically for technology to get LLMs and AI processing onto the iPhone.
