Acquiring small startups to retain talented employees is a common practice in Silicon Valley. There’s even a word for it: Acquihire, a portmanteau of acquisition and hire. Apple has apparently signed up for the company called “invrs.io LLC” and hired the founder, as MacRumors discovered. The company founder, Martin Schubert, has been working with applied optoelectronics for many years. He worked for a total of seven years at the research company “X, the moonshot factory”, a subsidiary of the Google Group Alphabet. He then worked at Meta as a researcher for around a year and a half. In September 2023 he started his own business with invrs.io.
Open source photonics benchmarks
A description of the company’s purpose can be found on the start-up’s GitHub profile:
invrs.io aims to advance AI-powered design, with an initial focus on optics – an area critical to components in AR/VR, data centers, autonomous vehicles – and beyond. We are developing an ecosystem that is accessible to everyone: from AI scientists to optimization researchers to optical designers.
At least the promise of free accessibility came to an abrupt end with the takeover by Apple: Since October 24, 2025, Schubert has made all GitHub repositories “public archive”; The further development of open source projects has obviously been stopped.
Published by the EU Commission
The takeover by Apple doesn’t seem to have made any big waves so far. The transaction became known through a rule in the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Companies with a gatekeeper function must inform the EU Commission about the acquisition of other companies. Four months later, the EU Commission made this information available to the general public. This list also includes the takeover of Pixelmator a good year ago.
Also part of Apple: database start-up
The penultimate acquisition by Apple published here took place on October 10, 2025 – on that day Apple took over the database developer “Kuzu”. Their GitHub projects have also been archived since the day of the takeover. This seems to have generated significantly more interest in the developer community: The main project collected a total of 3,700 stars and has now been forked almost 400 times in order to further develop it individually.
