Apple has bought Kuzu, a startup from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, that developed an embedded graph database. The purchase became public on February 11, 2026, when AppleInsider reported that it appeared in a list of acquisitions Apple had disclosed to the European Union under the Digital Markets Act.
According to the filing, Apple agreed on October 9, 2025, through an unnamed subsidiary, to buy all of Kuzu's shares and to hire some of its employees, BetaKit reported. The price and other terms were not disclosed, and Apple did not comment.
Kuzu's GitHub repository was archived on October 10, 2025, one day after the agreement date, and the company's website had gone offline by the time the deal was reported.
What Kuzu built
Kuzu made a graph database designed to run inside an application rather than as a separate server. The company described it as built for query speed, scalability and ease of use, and the EU listing describes Kuzu as a developer of lightweight embedded database technology.
A graph database stores information as connected points rather than as rows in tables, which suits data where relationships matter. MacTech reported that the software had been released on GitHub under the permissive MIT licence.
The technology grew out of research at the University of Waterloo. It started as a project in the Data Systems Group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, led by Semih Salihoğlu, an associate professor of computer science at Waterloo. BetaKit described Kuzu as a developer of fast and flexible graph databases, and MacTech said the company was based in Waterloo.
The founders
The team launched Kuzu as a company in 2023 to commercialise the database, with Salihoğlu as chief executive, the University of Waterloo said. Several students from his research group, Ziyi Chen, Xiyang Feng, Guodong Jin and Chang Liu, were co-founders, and Benjamin Winger, Royi Luo and Siddhartha Sahu were early engineers.
No funding round for Kuzu has been reported by the company or by the outlets that covered the sale, and none of the reports gave a headcount. The filing does not say how many employees Apple hired.
Why Apple might want it
Apple has not explained its plans. BetaKit, citing The Verge, said the technology could be used in FileMaker Pro, the database software sold by an Apple subsidiary, in the Freeform whiteboard app or the iWork suite, or for social features in Apple Music or Apple Games. BetaKit noted that Apple's motive remained unclear.
MacTech pointed out that FileMaker is a relational database, which stores data in structured tables, while a graph database models the relationships between records directly. AppleInsider had suggested a graph database could find a place in iWork, which includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
9to5Mac described the deal as likely a relatively small one. Apple rarely discusses its purchases, and companies it buys often remove most of their online presence afterwards, as Kuzu did.
How the deal came to light
The Digital Markets Act requires large technology companies designated as gatekeepers to tell the EU about intended mergers with other digital service providers, even when a deal is too small to trigger a normal competition review. The EU updates the list on a rolling basis, and 9to5Mac noted that Apple has probably made other purchases that do not appear on it. The listing is often the first public sign of an Apple deal, as it was here: the Kuzu agreement had been signed four months before anyone reported it.
9to5Mac noted that the same list includes Apple's purchases of Styra in August 2025, IC Mask Design in May 2025 and Pixelmator in early 2025, among others. In early February 2026 Apple also confirmed it had bought Q.ai, a deal reported at about $2 billion.
Kuzu is Apple's second acquisition of a Kitchener-Waterloo startup since 2024, according to BetaKit. The first was DarwinAI, which applied AI to visual quality inspection in manufacturing.
