Intel confirmed all rumors today about its acquisition of Moovit, the Israeli urban mobility startup, with a deal worth approximately $ 900 million.
Reports on the upcoming acquisition were published for the first time from the local Israeli newspaper Calcalist Sunday, and now on a press release Intel today confirmed the ongoing acquisition of Moovit with the aim of making its Mobileye project a "complete mobility provider", including robotaxi services.
Climbing autonomous vehicles
The chip giant Intel already has experience acquiring Israeli startups. Just Mobileye is a project born from the acquisition of the homonymous startup for 15,3 billion dollars in 2018. Mobileye was a computerized vision company specialized in autonomous vehicles. And a few months ago, Intel paid another $ 2 billion for Habana Labs, which develops artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. This latest acquisition is perhaps particularly noteworthy, given that Intel previously invested in Moovit through Intel Capital, its venture capital "rib".
Let's talk a second at Moovit
Founded in 2012, Moovit is best known for its app used by 500 million people to cross a city using a combination of transportation options that includes augmented reality (AR) directions. The company has focused its core business on the licensing of its platform through an offer of "mobility as a service". In practice, Moovit provides entities with data and analytics to improve urban transit infrastructure, while companies like TomTom and Microsoft offer real-time transportation data to include in their apps.
The timing of the Intel acquisition is remarkable, as it comes during a time of great uncertainty for companies like Moovit. The global pandemic has greatly reduced transportation, as people have stayed home. Moovit itself published data showing the impact of Covid-19 on the use of transport in major cities around the world, showing that in some areas it has decreased by 80%.
