Mobileye N.V., the Israeli vehicle safety and automation systems company, was acquired by Intel Corp. for $63.54 per share in cash – an equity value of about $15.3 billion and an enterprise value of $14.7 billion.
Mobileye develops “autonomous driving”, a market to be worth as much as $70 billion by 2030.
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Intel announced that it will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the issued and outstanding ordinary shares of Mobileye.
Mobileye N.V. was founded in 1999 by Prof. Amnon Shashua from Hebrew University. He evolved his academic research into a technical solution for a vision system which could detect vehicles using only a camera and software algorithms on a processor. Together with Ziv Aviram, he set up the company in Jerusalem.
The company initially developed camera-based technology for warning about road hazards and preventing collisions, which formed the basis for systems for driverless cars.
In 2014 and currently Mobileye has a market cap of $10.5 billion. Its share price has shot up about 30% since first reports of the deal.
BMW, GM and Volvo, were the company’s first clients. They integrated Mobileye’s technologies into their cars as an optional accessory. Today the system comes as a standard fit in new cars.
In January, Mobileye, BMW and Intel announced that they were developing a test fleet of 40 test vehicles on the road in the second half of this year, that would be on the road in the second half of 2017. Mobileye has forged ties with several more automotive and technology giants.
BMW, Intel and Mobileye, will have self-driving car fleet in 2017
Intel said that the acquisition of the Jerusalem based company will position it as a leading technology provider in the fast-growing market for highly and fully autonomous vehicles.
Farther more Intel announced that as cars “progress from assisted driving to fully autonomous, they are increasingly becoming data centers on wheels”. By 2020 driverless cars will generate 4,000 GB, or 4 terabytes, of data a day that can be mined for information.
Mobileye cofounder, president and CEO Ziv Aviram told Globes in an interview: “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.
“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.”
