PrimeSense confirms acquisition by Apple
The purchase was originally reported last week by Israel’s Calcalist business news site, which said the deal had been done for $345 million (see Apple moves to buy Kinect sensor firm).
Initially PrimeSense declined to confirm or deny the acquisition, but in an email to eeNews Europe PrimeSense said: "We can confirm the deal with Apple. Further than that, we cannot comment at this stage."
PrimeSense has reportedly raised about $80 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2005. The company has developed a technology that is a combination of infrared and visible image sensors and an image processor that could add z-dimension information to a two-dimensional image and thereby place players in the context of a game. It could also be used for gesture recognition as part of a human-machine interface.
PrimeSense is Apple’s second significant acquisition in Israel. In January 2012 Apple bought flash memory controller startup Anobit Technologies Ltd. for about $390 million. Anobit had developed NAND flash memory controller technology that could improve the apparent memory endurance – the number of reads and writes flash memory can perform.
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