Cambridge automated driving start-up acquired by Bosch

German multinational engineering and technology company Bosch has strengthened its focus on the development of self-driving cars by acquiring Cambridge-based start-up Five.ai.

Described by Bosch as “Europe’s leading start-up in the field of automated driving”, Five operates out of six UK locations and employs 140 people. Since it was set up in 2016, it has built a team of experts in cloud software, safety assurance, robotics and machine learning, and has placed itself at the forefront of developing state-of-the-art software and artificial intelligence-based solutions for autonomous driving, through SAE Level 4. 

Five now focuses on a cloud-based development and testing platform for the software used in self-driving cars. This offers engineers the programs they need to create automated driving software at pace, and to test it before and during its deployment in test vehicles. The platform is able to analyse real data from a fleet of test vehicles, create advanced testing scenarios, and build a simulation environment that makes it possible to assess and validate “system behaviour at hyper-scale”.

The agreement between the two companies is still subject to authority approval but is reported to have won out over other bidders.

Stan Boland, CEO of Five said, “Bosch is so clearly the world’s champion in driving assistance technologies, and those are the very same capabilities needed for many aspects of level 4 autonomous driving. Five’s corresponding “superpowers” live in fields complementary to those, in the same solution space. The challenges in autonomous turn out to be deep in each component and wide in system and environment contexts.”

But the clincher for both firms, says Boland, was a human one, in that “We found we shared the same burning ambition to build Europe’s global leader in safe level 4 autonomous driving.”

Dr Markus Heyn, Bosch board member and chairman of its Mobility Solutions business sector added, “Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer. We want Five to give an extra boost to our work in software development and offer our customers European-made technology.”