German chipmaker Bosch has acquired autonomous driving software startup Five, strengthening its autonomous vehicle platform.
The U.K. company has six location, and all 140 employees will be working on software for autonomous vehicles for Bosch. The financial details were not disclosed.
“Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer,” said Markus Heyn, member of the board of management at Bosch. “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.”
Five will be integrated into Bosch’s Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division and will work toward development SAE Level 4 autonomous technology for future vehicles.
(Learn more about the levels of self-driving cars on Globalspec.com.)
Five has developed cloud software, safety assurance, robotics and machine learning for Level 4 autonomous vehicles. The startup is focused primarily on cloud-based development and testing platforms for the software in autonomous vehicles. It can analyze real data from a fleet of test vehicles to create advanced testing scenarios and build a simulation environment to make it possible to assess and validate system behavior at scale.
Bosch is developing private vehicles with a focus on driver assistance and on partially and conditionally automated systems (SAE Level 1-3) technology. The team is also working on solutions for higher levels of automation, with a focus on fleet vehicles and new operating models.
