Tim Cook has said Apple is primarily looking for talent and intellectual property when it buys a company, and the record fits. We count 52 Apple software acquisitions in our records from 2015 to 2025, about five a year and most of them small technology teams, and its filings show $4.2bn of cash paid for acquisitions across fiscal 2015 to 2022, about 5 percent of what Apple spent buying back its own shares in fiscal 2025 alone.
With $416bn of revenue in its 2025 fiscal year, Apple buys at a steady pace and says very little about it. It prices the team and the technology and folds the product into its own, so a sale to Apple is part share sale and part hiring negotiation, and both parts need the same preparation.
Apple’s filings to the European Commission, company releases and press reports helped us fill out the deal list we hold from Mergermarket, which covers deals announced from 2015 to 2025 and since completed. Spend comes from Apple’s 10-K filings, and its approach from Tim Cook’s public statements.
Apple Subsidiaries and Who Runs Apple’s Acquisitions
Apple runs acquisitions from the center. Adrian Perica, vice president of Corporate Development, reports to Tim Cook and leads Apple’s mergers, acquisitions and strategic investing, a role he has held since joining Apple in 2009. His remit also covers integrating acquired technologies and businesses across hardware, software and services. Cook told shareholders in 2021 that the program exists to add technology and talent, and in 2025 he described the test as whether a company can help Apple accelerate a roadmap.
The two consumer brands Apple bought, Beats in 2014 and Shazam in 2018, still trade under their own names. Most of the companies it bought were technology teams whose work went into Apple’s own products and services. For an owner, the consequence is that Apple values what you have built by what it adds to an Apple product, and the operating business around it carries less weight in the price.
Apple also says little when it buys. When a deal surfaces, its standard response is that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time” and it declines to discuss its plans. Deals come out through the people involved: DarwinAI’s sale in 2024 became public through a Bloomberg report and the LinkedIn profiles of staff who had moved to Apple. Apple’s 2025 deals surfaced through the information it now gives the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act.
How Many Companies Apple Buys
From 2015 to 2025 Apple announced 52 software acquisitions that have since completed. The pace peaked at nine in 2015 and 2020 and has run at one to four a year since 2021: 31 deals in 2015 to 2019, 12 in 2020 to 2022 and nine in 2023 to 2025. Apple also buys chip, hardware and media businesses, which we break out under What Apple Buys; the other counts on this page cover its software acquisitions.
The slowdown matches Microsoft i Alphabet, which we track the same way. Microsoft went from 59 software acquisitions in 2015 to 2019 to three in 2023 to 2025, and Alphabet from 48 to eight over the same periods, against 31 and nine for Apple.
How Much Apple Spends on Acquisitions
Apple’s 10-K reports one number for acquisitions: the cash paid for businesses, net of the cash they held. It came to $4.2bn across fiscal 2015 to 2022. Most years fell between $297M and $721M, with a peak of $1.5bn in fiscal 2020, the year Apple paid for Intel’s smartphone modem business, and a low of $33M in fiscal 2021. From fiscal 2023 Apple folds the figure into other investing payments, so the series ends there.
Against Apple’s size the spending is small. Apple had $416bn of revenue in fiscal 2025, spent $34.6bn on research and development and $90.7bn buying back its own shares. Eight years of acquisition cash came to about 5 percent of one year’s buybacks. Budget is the easy part of a deal with Apple; fit with a product plan is the constraint.
The filings also show what the money buys. Apple’s goodwill rose by $1.1bn between the ends of fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2017, while it paid $969M in cash for acquisitions over those three years. Goodwill is the part of a price above the value of identifiable assets, so for these deals almost the whole price sat in people and know-how.
What Size of Company Apple Buys
A price is on record for 13 of the 52 software acquisitions, 25 percent. The median is $50M, the mean $76M and the interquartile range $28M to $125M, and eight of the 13 sit at $50M or below.
Reported prices skew large, because most are press estimates and the press estimates the deals that draw attention, so the typical Apple acquisition is likely smaller than the $50M median. Across the 28,449 software acquisitions of 2015 to 2025 we track, the median disclosed value is $25.4M.
The typical Apple acquisition is a venture-backed team of engineers with an early product. Twenty-three of the 52 name venture capital or other institutional investors among the sellers. Apple also buys larger companies: its purchase of Q.ai, an Israeli company working on audio and machine learning, in January 2026 was reported as the second largest in its history, after Beats. Cook said in 2025 that Apple is open on the size of company, provided it accelerates the roadmap.
What Apple Buys
Apple buys software that ends up inside its devices and services. By what the target did, the 52 software acquisitions break down as follows:
| Obszar | Przejęcia |
|---|---|
| AI, machine learning and voice | 19 |
| Developer tools and data infrastructure | 7 |
| Consumer services: health, education, payments, weather | 7 |
| Cameras, imaging and computer vision | 6 |
| AR, VR and motion capture | 6 |
| Music, media and games | 4 |
| Maps, location and autonomous driving | 3 |
| Beyond software: chips, hardware, media and IT services | 24 |
Artificial intelligence leads, and its share has grown: nine of 31 deals in 2015 to 2019, five of 12 in 2020 to 2022 and five of the nine in 2023 to 2025. Together with cameras and computer vision it accounts for 25 deals, about half of the total. The six AR, VR and motion capture deals ran from 2015 to 2020, ahead of the Vision Pro headset Apple announced in 2023. The four music and media deals fed Apple’s services, from Semetric, a music analytics company, in 2015 to AI Music in 2022.
Beyond its 52 software acquisitions, our records show 24 more: 12 chip and hardware businesses, from display, image sensor and power management assets to camera modules and headsets, seven music, media and games businesses, Shazam among them, two other technology businesses and three IT services firms. The chip and hardware deals include the largest priced acquisition of the period, Intel’s smartphone modem business.
Business software is a small part of it: seven deals in developer tools and data infrastructure, including databases, device management and access control. A company fits when its technology answers a question an Apple product team is already working on.
Where Apple Buys
Apple bought software companies in 13 countries. The United States leads with 26, followed by the United Kingdom with eight, Canada with five, and Finland, France and Israel with two each, then one each in Denmark, Germany, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Spain and Switzerland. By region, 31 were in North America, 18 in Europe, two in Israel and one in India.
Outside the US the deals follow specialist teams. The eight in the UK range from speech recognition and audio software to image processing and credit data, and Canada’s five include two AI teams, two developer tools companies and a contactless payments company. The 2026 deals add Q.ai in Israel and MotionVFX, a Polish developer of video editing plugins and templates bought from a local search fund in March 2026.
What Apple Pays: Acquisition Multiples and Prices
Apple publishes acquisition prices only in aggregate, and most of the companies it buys are too early for a revenue multiple to carry meaning. A sweep of every priced software deal for the target’s revenue or EBITDA finds revenue on one of the 13 and EBITDA on zero; the rest were venture-stage teams with zero revenue on record. A median needs five deals, so this page gives Apple’s prices in dollars.
For context, private software companies sell at a median of 3.7x revenue across 1,325 deals and 19.0x EBITDA across 622 in our research. At a 20 percent EBITDA margin, 3.7x revenue equals 18.5x EBITDA, so the two benchmarks agree for a business with ordinary margins. In our view a revenue multiple is the wrong lens for an Apple offer. Apple prices what the technology and the team add to its own products, so the same company can be worth far more to Apple than its revenue implies, or of little interest at any price.
What we can measure is the price per company. The median reported price is $50M and the mean $76M, against a median of $25.4M for software acquisitions as a whole. Reported prices describe the deals that drew attention, and 39 of the 52 went unpriced.
An Apple offer is also hard to check from the outside. Apple names few of its deals, the last reported price dates from 2022, and its acquisition cash moved into a broader line of the cash flow statement from fiscal 2023. The buyer prices from its own record of deals; the seller sees a handful of press estimates.
Have an offer from Apple?
If you have an offer from Apple on your desk, talk to us before you answer it. Apple is a strong buyer: it can pay for any company it wants, it buys teams and technology it needs for its own products, and it closes in cash. Its offers are also private, priced against a record of deals that only Apple can see, and they can come with job offers for part of your team and an end date for your product. Our job is to find the other buyers who want the same technology, including those who would keep the product running, and to negotiate the price and the terms for your people while there is still room to move them. Another buyer may offer a better deal, and even if Apple stays the right home, competitive pressure alone should push its valuation up. Call us before you sign a letter of intent.
How Apple Structures a Deal
Apple buys 100 percent and pays cash. Each of the seven deals with a stated stake, all from 2022 to 2025, was for 100 percent, and the 10-K line for acquisitions is cash paid, net of cash acquired.
The deal comes in two parts: a price for the shares and offers of employment for the people Apple wants. When Apple agreed to buy Kuzu, a Canadian graph database company, in October 2025, it bought all of the shares and hired select members of the team. With DarwinAI, dozens of staff joined Apple’s AI division, and with Q.ai the founding team, including the chief executive, joined Apple. Twenty-three of the 52 deals had venture investors among the sellers, and on a venture-backed company the investors’ preferences can take a large share of the price for the shares. For a founder the employment terms can therefore matter as much as the headline number, and the two are worth negotiating together.
A small deal can still draw a regulator. Apple’s purchase of Shazam fell below the EU’s merger thresholds, yet Austria asked the European Commission to review it and Iceland, Italy, France, Norway, Spain and Sweden joined the request. The review took about six months and cleared the deal in September 2018. Apple is now a designated gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act and informs the Commission of its acquisitions in the digital sector, and Pixelmator, announced in November 2024 subject to regulatory approval, closed in February 2025. Plan for a regulatory step on a deal of any size, and for it to make the deal public.
Apple’s preference for quiet deals shapes the process too. Agree with Apple at the outset what you can tell your staff and customers, and when, because the news is likely to reach them through a filing or a LinkedIn profile.
What Happens After Closing
Apple folds many acquired products into its own. It announced the purchase of Dark Sky, the weather app, in March 2020. The Android app shut that August, the iPhone app left the App Store in September 2022 and the app, website and data service closed on 1 January 2023, by which time Apple’s Weather app had absorbed its features. When Apple bought Primephonic, its announcement said the service was closed to new subscribers and would go offline eight days later, with a dedicated classical music app planned for the following year. DarwinAI’s website was down by the time its sale became public.
Some products keep running. Shazam still trades under its own name eight years after closing, and at announcement Pixelmator told users its apps would carry on as before.
People are the asset Apple pays for, and it hires selectively, so offers can go to part of your team and leave the rest for you to look after. Ask at the offer stage who Apple will hire, what happens to the product and its customers, and what support the rest of the team receives.
Apple’s Competitive Position
Apple is one of the ten most active strategic buyers in our ranking of software acquirers. In 2023 to 2025 it made nine software acquisitions, against three for Microsoft, eight for Alphabet, 14 each for Salesforce i ServiceNow, and 17 each for Cisco i IBM. Its average reported software deal value, $76M, is the smallest of those seven buyers by a wide margin, and it buys for its own devices and services.
That makes the competing field specific to each deal. We would look first for rival bids from other platform companies working on the same problem and from strategic buyers in the target’s own market, for whom the product and its customers carry value that Apple may set aside. A bidder that keeps the product running also puts a value on the customers and on the rest of the team.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Apple?
Apple is buying, and it says it wants more. On its July 2025 earnings call Cook said Apple was “very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap”. Q.ai followed in January 2026, and artificial intelligence made up five of Apple’s nine software acquisitions in 2023 to 2025.
The wider software market repriced in early 2026 as AI coding agents cast doubt on parts of the sector. In our March 2026 webinar on SaaS valuations we noted that the businesses holding up best were smaller, vertically focused and serving mission-critical workflows, and that more buyers now ask how a business is addressing AI disruption risk. For a company with machine learning, audio, imaging or on-device AI technology, Apple’s demand is strong now, on Cook’s words and its 2026 deals, and the price reflects what the technology adds to a buyer’s product.
The case for selling is strongest for a founder whose technology fits a product Apple is building and whose wealth sits mostly in one company. If your business earns its value from its own customers, a buyer that keeps the product running may pay more and keep your team together, and keeping the company is a good option too. The latest prices are in our mnożniki wyceny software badań.
Why You Need an M&A Advisor When Apple Approaches You
Apple has made 52 software acquisitions since 2015, keeps its prices private and writes the job offers; the owner across the table is selling one company.
Establish what the business is worth before the first offer arrives, from comparable transactions and from what your technology would be worth to more than one buyer. Then bring in one or two other buyers, at least one with a different reason to buy: a platform company working on the same problem, or a strategic buyer that wants the product and its customers. The second bid tests the first, and it tests the plan for your product and your people as well.
Negotiate the employment terms and the fate of the product as hard as the price: who receives an offer, on what terms, what happens to customers and staff outside the offer list, and how the price for the shares is split between investors and founders. Prepare for a regulatory step and for the deal becoming public on someone else’s schedule. The figures on this page describe a market; your company will be priced in a negotiation.
That is the work we do for owners of software and technology companies while they keep running the business, and running it well through the process matters, because how the business performs ends up in the price. For how an approach fits into a wider sale, see jak sprzedać firmę programistyczną i nabywców strategicznych a finansowych.
O Aventis Advisors
Aventis Advisors is an M&A advisor for software and technology companies. We believe the world would be better off with fewer but better quality M&A deals, done at the right moment for the company and its owners. Our goal is to provide honest, insight-driven advice that lays out all the options clearly, including the option to keep the status quo.
Skontaktuj się z nami aby porozmawiać o tym, ile może być warta Twoja firma i jak przebiega ten proces.
