Apple has acquired a number of companies in Israel over the years and the acquired company staff usually begin work at Apple's R&D facilities in both Haifa and Herzliya, a Seaside City in Israel.

Since 2011, known Israeli acquisitions have been Anovit Herzliya (Flash Memory), PrimeSense, LinX (3D Camera technology) and REALFACE (facial recognition). Today we're learning that yet another Israeli acquisition was made in 2019 for Camerai (formerly Tipit),  a technology company that developed a cross-platform AR Graphics application.

Camerai was founded in 2014, by Aaron Wetzler, Erez Tal, Jonathan Rimon, and Moty Kosharovsky, under the name Tipit. At the time of its sale to Apple, it employed 13 workers in Tel Aviv, a majority of whom were integrated into Apples’ office in Herzliya.

Camerai developes photography technology, including advanced capabilities in deep learning and computer vision. Camerai’s platform allows app and software developers to create augmented reality and image processing graphics without the need for technical knowledge or writing code.

After being integrated into Apple’s cameras it made life easier for developers who wanted to include AR capabilities in their various apps. For more on this, read the full Calcalist report.

A screenshot of the Camerai AR Studio software presented above is from a  Facebook GIF covering a Camerai AR Studio Tutorial.

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The images below are from Camerai Twitter where they still have examples of the kind of camera effects that could be created – So check out the site.  

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Patently Apple was unable to find patents filed under "Camerai" or "Tipit" in either the U.S. or European patent databases. One of the owners, Aaron Wetzler, however, is listed on a number of patents filed in Haifa Israel under Technion Research & Development Foundation Ltd. I pursued this angle back to a patent filed in the U.S. but I was unable to make the connection back to Apple Inc. in any way. The patent is an interesting one about in-air hand gesturing that was also granted in the U.S. Unfortunately I couldn't definitively make a connection to Apple acquiring this patent. The same was true for this patent as well.

If I find a link between Aaron Wetzler and Camerai or Apple patents in the future I'll be able to list his many important patents. For now, that angle of our report was a dead end.