Consumer goods company Bosch has acquired autonomous vehicle technology startup Five for an undisclosed sum.
Bosch beat off other bidders to purchase the U.K.-based company and says the two share "a common vision of automated driving and of safe automated driving systems."
Dr. Markus Heyn, chairman of the mobility solutions sector within Bosch, says: "Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer. 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.”
Stan Boland, CEO of Five, says: “Scale matters in building automated driving technology. Bosch is a global leader in driving assistance technologies, with core technologies and vast data lakes that will be essential in bringing safe self-driving systems to market."
Five, which was founded in 2016, is working on a cloud-based development and testing platform for self-driving cars.
The plan is to merge its software engineering team with that of Bosch, which also recently acquired digital maps company Atlatec.
Five announced a $41 million Series B round two years ago bringing its total funding to $77 million.
During a PhocusWire In The Big Chair interview last year, Boland highlighted the use cases for autonomous vehicles in travel and tourism as well as the challenges facing the implementation of the technology.