It'd be wrong to suggest any company is impervious to the economic effects of coronavirus. But Intel and its Mobileye subsidiary are charting a course to their long-term goals without so much as a shrug toward short-term disruptions.
Rather than hunker down, Mobileye acquired transit app Moovit last month for $900 million, a deal that brings a network of users into the fold for a robotaxi service that's scheduled to launch in 2022.
Moovit's app helps its 40 million active users plan journeys across cities and aggregates transportation options from a variety of ride-hailing, micromobility and public transportation sources in more than 3,000 cities. If a global user base was one key driver for Mobileye's interest, so were the data-driven insights that Moovit can provide on how people move around cities.
Using that analytics capability amounts to a "mobility intelligence layer," that Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua says is a key part of the company's roadmap to use self-driving technology to offer commercial robotaxi service.
"You need data on usage of transportation, how to place your vehicles in an optimal manner and how to optimize the number of vehicles," he said. "All this is intelligence, and Moovit's data is critical."
Including information that Mobileye has crowd-sourced from millions of vehicles on the road with its computer-vision systems, the companies are armed with a substantial amount of data that has grown into a revenue stream, adjacent to what Intel believes is a $160 billion robotaxi market by 2030.
Should that not materialize, Intel and Mobileye together remain a key player in the burgeoning driver-assist market. From producing its own chips to acquiring Moovit for a public-facing network, there may not be another entity that's assembled an end-to-end puzzle for a business predicted on self-driving technology like Intel and Mobileye.
The acquisition's COVID-era timing brought questions, but Shashua said "waiting any longer would jeopardize our readiness for 2022. … Our confidence in the maturity of our self-driving technology is why we believe we can meet the timeline, and that's why we need all layers of this stack ready. This has driven the decision to acquire them now."
