Apple strikes a deal to hire the ex-NotebookLM team behind AI audio app Huxe

Apple has signed a deal that lets it hire staff from Huxe, the AI audio startup founded by three former members of Google’s NotebookLM team, and license the startup’s technology. The arrangement, dated June 9, 2026, appears in a European Commission list of deals that big tech “gatekeepers” must report under the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The entry came to light on October 9, and Apple hasn’t announced or commented on the deal.

What the filing says

The entry says Apple “will have the right to make employment offers to and hire certain employees of Huxe AI, Inc. (‘Huxe’) and receive a non-exclusive license to Huxe’s intellectual property rights.” It describes Huxe as a company that “provides a mobile application that creates personalized audio content.”

That makes it an acqui-hire rather than a takeover. Apple isn’t buying Huxe itself, and because the licence is non-exclusive, Huxe’s owners could in principle license the same technology to someone else. The filing gives no price and doesn’t say how many people Apple may hire or what it plans to do with the technology.

From NotebookLM to Huxe

Huxe’s founders worked on NotebookLM from its start. Raiza Martin was the product manager leading it, Jason Spielman was a designer and Stephen Hughes an engineer. NotebookLM became one of Google’s surprise AI hits in 2024 thanks to Audio Overviews, which turn a user’s documents into a podcast-style chat between two AI hosts.

The three left Google in December 2024. They first tried a chatbot aimed at businesses, then switched to consumers, and opened Huxe to invited users in June 2025. In a launch post, Martin said NotebookLM had shown people wanted to take information with them, but still left them doing the legwork:

We’re still making people do all the work. Upload your docs. Find your sources. Curate your content. What about everything you don’t even know you should be tracking?

Raiza Martin, co-founder of Huxe

Martin, who has said she didn’t go to college and worked her way from customer support to Google, called Huxe “radio made for you.”

What Huxe did

Huxe opened to everyone on iOS and Android on September 23, 2025, alongside $4.6 million in funding from Conviction, Genius Ventures, Figma chief executive Dylan Field and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean.

The app had three main parts. A morning briefing turned a user’s email and calendar into a few minutes of audio. Any question could become a podcast-style discussion between AI hosts, which listeners could interrupt to ask for more detail or a different explanation. And “live stations” tracked a topic, such as a competitor, a share portfolio or a sports team, and kept generating fresh updates as the story moved. The idea, Martin wrote on X, was an app where you “don’t need to ask questions, no prompts required.”

Rivals followed fast. Two days after the public launch, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Pulse, which also delivers proactive morning updates. Martin wrote on X that many people had pointed out “LOTS of similarities to Huxe, down to the UX, the banners, the taglines, the entire concept,” but called it “really positive validation.”

A short life

A notice dated May 21, 2026 that still sits on Huxe’s website says the team had “made the decision to wind down Huxe” and was “moving on to new things.” The app was pulled from the App Store and Google Play that day, the service stopped on May 28 and user data was deleted on May 29. Huxe gave no reason. By then Spotify, Amazon, Meta, ElevenLabs and Google itself all offered some form of AI-generated personal podcast.

Apple’s deal is dated less than two weeks after the service ended. The same Commission list shows two other small Apple deals this year, for plasma simulation firm PlasmaSolve in April and magnetic sensor chip developer Sonera in May, but Huxe is the only one squarely about AI. Spoken briefings drawn from email and calendar are an obvious fit for Siri and AirPods, though Apple hasn’t said where the team will work. Apple is under pressure to catch up on AI, as our analysis of Apple’s place in the AI race set out.

Why it matters

Apple has mostly added AI talent through small deals like this one, and this one only came to light because EU rules make gatekeepers report it. It brings in people who helped build one of Google’s best-known AI features, at a time when Apple badly needs AI products people actually want to use.

Sources: European Commission, Digital Markets Act transparency list of acquisitions; Huxe, “The Superpower of Knowing” by Raiza Martin; Huxe shutdown notice; Raiza Martin on X; TechCrunch (launch and funding).