Autonomous vehicles are a part of the tech-infused tomorrow we envision to be a part of. As one of the world’s biggest mobility providers, German tech giant Bosch is now strengthening its hand in the autonomous market. Today, the firm has announced to acquire Five.AI, the Cambridge UK-based self-driving autonomous car startup, at an undisclosed amount.
Five had been seeking a buyer, and Bosch noted that it reserved the deal by scoring it from “other takeover bidders.” It will be taking IP from Five, and around 140 employees in the UK Bosch as per the company press release.
“Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer. We want Five to give an extra boost to our work in software development for safe automated driving, and offer our customers European-made technology,” says Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the Bosch board of management and chairman of the Mobility Solutions business sector.
Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, Five is to be part of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division. “Scale matters in building automated driving technology. Bosch is a global leader in driving assistance technologies, with core technologies and vast data lakes that will be essential in bringing safe self-driving systems to market. We’re excited for Five to become part of Europe’s most powerful SAE Level 4 player and to be a part of Bosch’s future success,” says Stan Boland, the CEO of Five.
According to Five, they preferred Bosch over other takeover bidders as the two companies share a common vision of automated driving and safe automated driving systems. The agreements with Five were signed at the beginning of April. The acquisition is still subject to approval by the antitrust authorities.
Since it was set up in 2016, Five has built a team of experts in cloud software, safety assurance, robotics and machine learning, and has placed itself at the forefront of developing state-of-the-art software and artificial intelligence-based solutions for autonomous driving, through SAE Level 4. The startup now focuses primarily on a cloud-based development and testing platform for the software used in self-driving cars. This offers engineers the programs they need to create automated driving software at pace, and to test it before and during its deployment in test vehicles. The platform is able to analyse real data from a fleet of test vehicles, create advanced testing scenarios, and build a simulation environment that makes it possible to assess and validate system behavior at hyper-scale.
Agile collaboration between Bosch and Five teams
At Bosch, Five will strengthen the company’s agile project structure for the development of self-driving cars. The two teams’ software engineering environments complement each other very well, and will be merged to form a single solution. “Five is the perfect fit for our engineering activities – not least due to its associates’ mindset and agile approach. This brings us closer to our aim of getting safe automated driving onto our roads,” says Dr. Mathias Pillin, president of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division.
For Bosch, moreover, the acquisition is a further step toward consolidating its market position in software and automated driving and competing with the likes of Google and Tesla. Only recently, the company extended its portfolio by acquiring Atlatec GmbH, a specialist in the field of high-resolution digital maps. This means Bosch will be focusing on offering its customers all the necessary building blocks of automated driving from a single source – from actuators, sensors, and maps to software and the engineering environment.
Bosch is working on all levels of automated driving
Further, for Bosch, automated driving is and will remain a strategic business field. On one hand, with the aim of making driving safer and more relaxed, it is developing solutions for private vehicles with a focus on driver assistance and on partially and conditionally automated systems On the other side, the team is also working on solutions for higher levels of automation, with a focus on fleet vehicles and new operating models. Moreover, Bosch has already developed automated valet parking, the first production-ready driving function not to require a driver.
