Bosch has announced the acquisition of UK-based automated driving start-up Five.
With six locations across the UK, Five currently has 140 associates working on software development for safe automated driving systems
Following the acquisition, Five, which is headquartered in Cambridge, will become part of Bosch’s Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division.
Financial details of the agreement, which was signed at the beginning of April, will not be disclosed and the acquisition is still subject to approval by the antitrust authorities.
Dr Markus Heyn, member of the Bosch board of management and chairman of the company’s mobility solutions business sector, said: “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.”
The acquisition will see both companies’ software engineering environments merged to form a single solution.
Since it was set up in 2016, Five has used cloud software, safety assurance, robotics and machine learning to develop software and artificial intelligence-based solutions for autonomous driving, through SAE Level 4.
The start-up now focuses primarily on a cloud-based development and testing platform for the software used in self-driving cars.
According to the company, this offers engineers the programmes needed 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.
“Scale matters in building automated driving technology,” said Stan Boland, CEO of Five. “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.”
For Bosch, the acquisition is a further step toward consolidating its market position in software and automated driving, after it recently extended its portfolio by acquiring Atlatec, a developer of high-resolution digital maps.
According to Bosch, both acquisitions will enable it to offer the necessary building blocks of automated driving from a single source – from actuators, sensors and maps to software and the engineering environment.
