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First they partnered, and now comes the acquisition: The computing giant Intel has confirmed that it is acquiring Mobileye, a leader in computer vision for autonomous driving technology, for $15.3 billion — the biggest-ever acquisition of an Israeli tech company.
Specifically, “Under the terms of the agreement, a subsidiary of Intel will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the issued and outstanding ordinary shares of Mobileye for $63.54 per share in cash, representing a fully-diluted equity value of approximately $15.3 billion and an enterprise value of $14.7 billion,” the company noted in a statement. The deal is expected to close in about nine months, Intel said.
Mobileye today covers a range of technology and services, including sensor fusion, mapping, front- and rear-facing camera tech and, beginning in 2018, crowdsourcing data for high-definition maps, as well as driving policy intelligence underlying driving decisions. This deal will bring under Intel’s umbrella not only a much bigger range of the different pieces that go into autonomous driving systems, but also a number of relationships with automakers. In the call today, Mobileye’s CTO and co-founder Amnon Shashua said the company is working with 27 car manufacturers, including 10 production programs with Audi, BMW and others going into 2017.
“This acquisition is a great step forward for our shareholders, the automotive industry and consumers,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, in a statement. “Intel provides critical foundational technologies for autonomous driving including plotting the car’s path and making real-time driving decisions. Mobileye brings the industry’s best automotive-grade computer vision and strong momentum with automakers and suppliers. Together, we can accelerate the future of autonomous driving with improved performance in a cloud-to-car solution at a lower cost for automakers.”
“We expect the growth towards autonomous driving to be transformative. It will provide consumers with safer, more flexible, and less costly transportation options, and provide incremental business model opportunities for our automaker customers,” Ziv Aviram, Mobileye co-founder, president and CEO, added. “By pooling together our infrastructure and resources, we can enhance and accelerate our combined know-how in the areas of mapping, virtual driving, simulators, development tool chains, hardware, data centers and high-performance computing platforms. Together, we will provide an attractive value proposition for the automotive industry.”
Confirming our earlier report, Intel said that Mobileye’s CTO and co-founder, Prof. Amnon Shashua, will lead Intel’s autonomous driving division, which will be based in Israel. Doug Davis, Intel’s SVP, will oversee how Mobileye and Intel work together across the whole company and will report to Shashua.
Other notable exits that have tapped into Israel’s expertise in computer vision and machine learning have included Google buying mapping startup Waze for $1.1 billion and Apple buying 3D sensor specialist PrimeSense for reportedly around $300 million.
The negotiations about what stays where for Mobileye and Intel are reminiscent of one of the other big M&A deals in Israel’s tech history, concerning Waze. Originally, Waze was being courted by Facebook, although there were disagreements over where Waze’s staff would be centered: engineering wanted to stay in Israel while Facebook was keen to get them to Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park. Ultimately, that delay led to Google swooping in, agreeing to Waze’s terms and closing the deal.
Intel has been working officially with Mobileye since last year. Earlier this year, with BMW, the two started to test 40 self-driving cars equipped with the two companies’ technology. Mobileye was also an early partner of Tesla’s for its autonomous technology, although that relationship is ending amid some controversial undertones about safety measures at the carmaker. Other investments that Intel has made in the space of cars include taking a stake in Here (which will feed into the mapping initiatives at Mobileye); acquiring Itseez and Yogitech for safety and navigation functionalities in autonomous cars; making a commitment of at least $250 million to the space (which sounds so tiny considering today’s price tag); keeping a strong presence at auto shows; and, in November, launching a dedicated autonomous driving group, which is headed up by Doug Davis, who will now report to Mobileye’s CTO.
Mobileye went public on the Nasdaq in 2014 and currently has a market cap of about $10.5 billion. It’s trading up now more than 33 percent ahead of the market opening on the news. As a point of context, the company had moved only 0.83 percent on Friday’s trades.
Intel had been a leader in processors at the peak of the PC era, although it has competed hard (and often lost) as smartphones overtook the larger devices as consumers’ computers of choice.
Moving deeper into self-driving technology is part of Intel’s bigger strategy to build up its position in emerging areas of computing. Other verticals that Intel has focused on include connected “objects” (IoT) and virtual and augmented reality. It has been following through on this strategy with acquisitions as well as organic growth.
“The combination 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,” the company continued. “Intel estimates the vehicle systems, data and services market opportunity to be up to $70 billion by 2030. The transaction extends Intel’s strategy to invest in data-intensive market opportunities that build on the company’s strengths in computing and connectivity from the cloud, through the network, to the device.”
Intel has disclosed several other acquisitions in Israel to fill out that strategy, including buying a personal assistant platform from Ginger Software; Omek Interactive for gesture-based technologies; and Replay Technologies for 3D video.
Intel is not the only company that is investing in and acquiring startups in the area of computer vision to raise its game in the area of autonomous cars.
Just earlier today, Valeo, the automotive parts giant, announced that it had acquired gestigon, a start‑up out of Germany that develops in-car 3D image processing software — used both to communicate to the driver as well as pick up signals from within the car and from the driver to communicate to a self-driving (or partially self-driving) car what to do next.
Terms of the deal, which includes staff as well as IP, were not disclosed. Valeo has been a regular investor in autonomous driving tech, taking a stake, for example, in French autonomous shuttle company Navya and getting a license in California to test self-driving cars. This latest acquisition shows that it remains serious about doing more in this area.
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