Two more companies have been quietly acquired by Apple, giving it technology and staff that appear to be working on Apple Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence.
While Apple has always bought firms, typically making at least several Acquisitions every year, most recently it appears to have been buying AI firms in particular. Now, as first spotted by MacGeneration, it’s been revealed that Apple has bought at least two more such companies.
Personas for Apple Vision Pro
One of them is TrueMeeting, which lets users scan their faces with their iPhones and produce an AI avatar image. The company’s official site has been removed, but TrueMeeting claimed to make a “hyper-realistic digital twin” of the user.
The firm’s CommonGround Human AI Technology then integrated with other apps ranging from games to communications, such as video conferencing. While neither Apple nor TrueMeeting have commented publicly, it seems that Apple acquired it to further develop the Apple Vision Pro’s Personas feature.
TrueMeeting is most likely to have been officially acquired during late 2024 — and by June 2025, visionOS 26 was showing a much more natural Persona in the Apple Vision Pro headset. Apple’s Personas feature was already being improved, so it can’t be proved that TrueMeeting has had an influence yet, but it appears so.
Combating AI hallucinations
Around the same time, Apple also bought WhyLabs, which is concerned with monitoring AI large language models and, ultimately, preventing hallucinations. It does that through tracking what the company describes on its still active official site as drift and performance degradations.
Beyond that, it aims to offer blocking of security issues such as malicious misuse of generative AI such as Apple Intelligence. In a promo video, it gives the example of a customer service chatbot disclosing a user’s delivery address, for instance, and how with WhyLabs that data would be redacted.
Tracking Apple’s acquisitions
Apple continually buys companies in order to acquire their technology or sometimes just their staff. Apple never discloses any acquisition, though, unless it’s in some way advantageous to do so — or if it’s required to under regulations covering, for instance, the size of the deal.
So in 2021, Apple was upfront about buying the Primephonic streaming service, because it wanted to promote how it would be launching Apple Music Classical.
Since 2023 when the EU’s Digital Markets Act was in progress, however, it’s become more likely that Apple will be required to disclose acquisitions. Since Apple, along with Google, Amazon and others, have been designated Gatekeepers by the EU, they are each now obliged to detail acquisitions under certain circumstances.
Specifically, they must inform the European Commission of any acquisition “where the merging entities or the target of the concentration provide core platform services or any other services in the digital sector or enable the collection of data.” The EU publishes a list of such acquisitions, though the detail is limited and the dates given are when these deals are published, not when they actually happen.
Plus the EU says its list is updated “not earlier than four months after receipt of the information.” Consequently, the EU lists Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator as being on February 11, 2025, when the deal was actually first revealed in November 2024.
So while the EU lists January 24, 2025, as the date for both TrueMeeting and WhyLabs, they were probably acquired in Q4 2024.
