I used to work at Wire. As far as I know there was no shady buyout, just new investors who were less lax about wanting Wire to actually make money. So they started reorienting at big corporate clients.

The technology itself wasn't changed and Wire was still involved in exciting things like MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mls-protocol/) when all this was happening (~4 years ago).