Aviad Maizels has pulled off the unique trick of selling two companies to Apple. The first time was in 2013 when Apple acquired Israeli company PrimeSense in one of the first-ever AI acquisitions. PrimeSense had developed a sensor for 3D vision and marketed it for game consoles. It was a historic acquisition enabling Apple to develop, among other things, the facial recognition algorithm that allows it to lock and unlock screens in less than a second and allow payments based solely on facial recognition.
For the company's entrepreneurs, including Maizels, who was PrimeSense’s president, it was a good deal but not one that made Maizels and the company’s other founders and employees hugely wealthy. Investors like Silver Lake Partners took most of the $350 million, even though they invested at a very late stage they enjoyed the returns more than anyone else.
The entrepreneurs took a handsome cut, but not to the extent of the new historic deal announced yesterday evening in which Apple acquired imaging and machine learning company Q.ai. No financial details were disclosed but "The Financial Times" values the deal for the virtually unknown company from Ramat Gan at nearly $2 billion. This will be Apple’s second biggest-ever acquisition after the purchase of headphones company Beats, 12 years ago for $3 billion.
Maizels, a shadowy figure who has steered clear of the media since the 2013 acquisition of PrimeSense, and his fellow Q.ai founders will this time win big time. According to PitchBook, Q.ai has only raised $25 million and its one and only financing round in 2023 gave it a valuation of just $53.4 million. In that financing round investors purchased 45.8% of the company’s shares, with the main investors being Israel’s Aleph Fund with an investment led by managing partner Eden Shochat, Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures (GV). Each of these three funds should rake in $100-150 million. Smaller investors including Samsung Next, Spark Capital, and Matter Venture Partners will see tens of millions of dollars each.
The biggest beneficiaries, according to PitchBook, are the three founders - CTO Maizels, CTO Dr. Yonatan Wexler and COO Dr. Avi Barliya. The three founders together with 270 employees will divide up some $1 billion. The founders will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars.
There is no doubt that Maizels second attempt at Q.ai is more financially successful than PrimeSense, and now the task seems to be even greater: to help Apple close the wide gap that has opened between it and the other big tech giants. The fact that computer vision experts have founded a company that deals with both computer vision and computer hearing ignites the imagination about the direction Apple might take following the acquisition and in the wake of its announcement that it has abandoned Siri in favor of Google's Gemini.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 30, 2026.
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