Chip maker Intel has agreed to buy Mobileye for $15.3 billion.
This is the largest buyout ever of an Israeli company, said Reuters. It’s also the biggest purchase of a company exclusively dedicated to autonomous driving, said the news outlet.
The combination of Mobileye and Intel “is expected to accelerate innovation for the automotive industry and position Intel as a leading technology provider in the fast-growing market for highly and fully autonomous vehicles,” said an Intel statement.
Intel and Mobileye are already collaborating on developing BMW’s iNext self-driving system, which aims to power self driving cars by 2021.
Mobileye sells to the aftermarket a forward collision warning add-on system that provides headway monitoring/following time, lane departure warning and other alerts.
Mobileye was founded in 1999. It received a $130 million investment from Goldman Sachs in 2007 and joined the NY Stock Exchange in 2014. It has a market value of $10.6 billion.
You can read more here and here.
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