According to Bloomberg, Apple has added DarwinAI, a Canadian AI startup that specializes in vision-based technology to monitor components throughout manufacture to increase efficiency, to its list of startups it plans to acquire.

Although neither Apple nor DarwinAI have made this arrangement public, according to their LinkedIn profiles, a number of the startup’s employees joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January.

Through multiple rounds of funding, investors like BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund, Honeywell Ventures, Obvious Ventures, and Inovia Capital have contributed over $15 million to DarwinAI. On their website, BDC Capital affirms that it has received an exit from DarwinAI, while Obvious Venture has updated their portfolio to reflect the acquisition of the startup.

At the time of writing, BDC Capital and Obvious Venture had not responded to inquiries about the report. Apple did not answer queries for comment right away.

In addition to improving manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI employs methods to create AI models that are quicker and smaller, as mentioned by Bloomberg in their study. This may be helpful for the generative AI features that Apple plans to include in iOS 18 later this year.

Comparing Apple to competitors like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, the latter four have released gen-AI powered capabilities faster than Apple. Tim Cook stated in February that the features will be released “later this year” by the firm.

During a quarterly earnings call with analysts, Cook stated, “We continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.”

The chief executive at Apple revealed funding for gen-AI initiatives last year. According to Apple’s job postings, the company is investigating integrating AI into a number of internal and external products, such as developer tools, customer service, and Siri.