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GroupM appoints David Grabert as global corpcomm director
MUMBAI: GroupM has named David Grabert as global director of corporate communications.
In this role, he will lead strategic external and internal communications to support GroupM’s worldwide leadership in media investment, data and technology on behalf of the company’s agencies and clients.
The role underscores GroupM’s commitment to continuously moving the business forward on behalf of clients by expressing points of view on the most critical industry issues including buying automation, viewability, accountability, transparency, attribution and more.
Grabert joins GroupM from Clear Channel Outdoor, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, Inc., where he led corporate communications for the company’s Americas division. He is a 15-year media industry veteran with prior senior communications and marketing experience at Cox Communications, Comcast and Canoe Ventures. In his cable telecommunications career, he helped launch multiple advanced television, telephony and advertising solutions. With expertise in technology, data, privacy, anti-piracy and other issues, Grabert will be a key player in driving GroupM’s worldwide thought leadership.
Based in New York, Grabert will report to GroupM global head of marketing, communications and business development Elizabeth McCune.
“Having David in this important role shows GroupM’s commitment to being a vocal industry leader,” said McCune.
MUMBAI: Apple just folded a photonics startup into its empire because when you’re building the future of light, sometimes you need to acquire the blueprint. Apple has quietly acquired key assets from invrs.io, a small AI-focused photonics startup, and brought its founder and sole employee, Martin Schubert, on board, according to a regulatory filing submitted to the European Union in October 2025.
The filing reveals that Apple would take over certain assets from invrs.io while hiring Schubert, a research scientist with prior stints at Meta, Google, and Micron Technology, where he worked on advanced display, semiconductor, and optical technologies.
Invrs.io specialised in open-source frameworks for photonics research, the science of controlling and manipulating light, critical to cameras, sensors, LiDAR, and displays across Apple’s ecosystem. The startup’s tools used AI-guided design to accelerate optical system simulation, optimisation, and benchmarking, aiming to make complex engineering more accessible to AI researchers and hardware developers.
Apple has not disclosed specific plans for integrating the technology, but the acquisition points to deeper ambitions in hardware-level AI. Enhanced light-based modelling could refine camera performance in iPhones and iPads, boost sensor accuracy in wearables, optimise spatial computing in Vision Pro, and advance next-generation displays and LiDAR systems.
Though modest compared with Apple’s blockbuster deals, the move underscores the company’s push to embed AI not just in software but in the physical foundations of its devices. As custom silicon and on-device AI accelerate, photonics expertise at the intersection of light and intelligence could prove a key differentiator.
For a company that once revolutionised screens with Retina displays, quietly snapping up a photonics innovator feels like the next logical step ensuring the light inside Apple’s world shines brighter, sharper, and smarter than ever.
