Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

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On June 25, a document showed that Drive.ai, a driverless project endorsed by Wu Enda, would be closed this Friday. Meanwhile, Apple completed its acquisition of Drive.ai.

Once a high-profile driverless star project, but now sadly left.

Drive.ai, a driverless startup, will close its offices and lay off 90 employees on Friday, according to a public filing with the California Employment Development Agency.

At the same time, another news also surfaced: Apple completed the acquisition of Drive.ai.

The acquisition amount was not disclosed, but the nominal acquisition actually involved some Drive.ai employees joining Apple's autonomous driving R & D department, which was confirmed by recent updates to their LinkedIn profiles.

As a driverless project endorsed by Wu Enda, a well-known artificial intelligence expert, Drive.ai has had its own halo since its birth. With Wu Enda's influence in the industry and strong R & D team, Drive.ai has also won the favor of many well-known investment institutions. Taking advantage of the driverless entrepreneurship boom, Drive.ai's development was once smooth, and even stood out among a number of similar projects, taking the lead in commercialization attempts.

However, with the increasingly prominent bottlenecks faced by the driverless industry in terms of technology and supervision, the star effect of Drive.ai gradually fades away, and the inability to truly commercialize becomes an obstacle to its continued financial support.

At the beginning of this year, Drive.ai began to seek to sell, while team members began to leave, the original plan to expand to 170 people team eventually shrunk to less than 100 people, Drive.ai remaining team was eventually acquired by Apple, although not the worst outcome, but obviously far from the company's initial ambitious goals, Wu Enda himself, a former director of Drive.ai, also transferred his energy to other artificial intelligence-related projects he founded.

Wu Enda's "direct descendants" composed of "luxury lineup"

Drive.ai has had its own aura since its birth. In 2015, the startup, which is engaged in the development of autonomous driving technology, was formally founded. Its main members are students from Stanford University's artificial intelligence laboratory led by well-known artificial intelligence expert Enda Wu.

At the beginning of 2017, at the Emtech Digital conference hosted by MIT Technology Review, Drive.ai, which has been keeping a low profile and mysterious since its establishment, made its first public appearance.

The event had some unexpected tidbits. Wu Enda, then Baidu's chief scientist, was the most important guest at the event. He was originally going to deliver a keynote speech, but a few days before the event began, Wu Enda stepped down as Baidu's chief scientist. When everyone expected him to appear at the event, he temporarily cancelled attending the event.

However, Wu Enda's wife Carol Reiley participated in this event as the co-founder of Drive.ai, which also attracted more attention. At this event, she and another co-founder and CEO, Sameep Tandon, who was also Wu Enda's former student at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, demonstrated Drive.ai's current achievements in the field of driverless driving.

At that time, based on Wu Enda and Drive.ai inextricably linked, The outside world once speculated, Wu Enda after leaving Baidu, Very likely to join Drive.ai, Engaged in autonomous driving technology-related entrepreneurial activities, But Tencent "Periscope" At the event scene to Wu Enda's wife Carol Reiley to verify the matter, Get the latter explicitly denied, She said, Wu Enda will not join Drive.ai, But as a consultant to give business guidance and help.

At the event that day, the outside world had the first chance to see Drive.ai's achievements in the development of autonomous driving technology, but in the form of a test video. At the day's event, Reiley showed a video of a driverless vehicle loaded with Drive.ai driving on a rainy night street, showing that the rainy driving problem that had plagued many driverless companies, including Google, had been overcome by Drive.ai's technology.

Reiley said at the time that Drive.ai welcomed outsiders to participate in the test drive, and participants could sit in the car and experience driverless driving.

Relying on Wu Enda's endorsement and strong team, Drive.ai has won the favor of many well-known investment institutions. After two years of establishment, Drive.ai has received $12 million in financing, including Northern Lights Venture Capital and Oriza Ventures.

From driverless technology demonstration to commercialization attempt

After several years of development and testing, Drive.ai began commercial trials of driverless vehicles. In July last year, Drive.ai announced the official opening of driverless ride-hailing services in Frisco, Texas, similar to the driverless version of Uber, where users summon Drive.ai vehicles via mobile apps, but the routes are relatively fixed, pre-planned routes, and pick-up and drop-off locations are fixed.

Drive.ai co-founder Wang Tao told Tencent at the time that the project would be Texas 'first driverless car service open to the public.

Drive.ai says the driverless service is designed to solve the "last mile" problem in traffic, providing travel between distances that are "too far to walk and too close to drive (or too crowded to find parking)."

In the initial phase of the project, there will be safety drivers sitting in the driver's seat to monitor the operation of the vehicle, but Drive.ai said that it plans to soon have safety drivers sitting in the passenger seat to experience the driverless process with passengers and eventually provide a passenger only driverless experience.

Wang Tao said that at present, the company has a team of about 120 people, which is a multi-disciplinary and cross-field professional team. It has its own core technology in each sub-module such as sensor fusion, cognition, decision planning, positioning and offline simulation. Drive.ai plans to expand its team to 170 people in the third quarter of this year.

At this time, Wu Enda's role has become a director of Drive.ai. Wang Tao told "Periscope" at that time that Wu Enda has been very actively involved in various affairs of the company since joining, especially in the strategic direction of the company.

At the same time of commercialization attempt, Drive.ai continued to demonstrate its autonomous driving technology strength to the outside world in various ways. In May of that year, Drive.ai showed a 4-minute video of driverless test from an in-car perspective. Drive.ai's driverless car had no one in the driver's seat throughout the journey, realizing full driverless driving.

According to the video demonstration played at 3x, the driverless car drove out of the parking space and crossed a six-lane public road section. Before crossing, the vehicle judged the road conditions on the transverse lane. On the way, the vehicle also passed through the circular road and the interference of the sunset on the detection system. For these road conditions, the vehicle successfully responded.

In the lower right corner of the video, Drive.ai also shows augmented reality images of object recognition during vehicle driving to show that the system uses sensor data to identify objects such as vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. on the road. Through this real-time data, vehicles can make route planning with safety and maximum passenger comfort.

By September 2017, Drive.ai had completed five rounds of funding totaling $77 million, valued at $200 million, with more prominent investors joining, including GGV Capital, New Enterprise Associates, NVIDIA Venture Capital and others.

Ending Independent Operations Employees Joining Apple

However, just when everything seemed to be going smoothly, things began to change quietly. In March 2018, Uber's driverless test vehicle in Arizona killed pedestrians, and two months later, a Google-owned Waymo vehicle undergoing driverless testing was also involved in a serious accident, and the safety of driverless vehicles was widely discussed again.

A spate of accidents has made people realize the reality that autonomous driving in its full sense will not be realized soon, that there has been no explosive growth in the autonomous driving industry due to technical and regulatory constraints, and that after a flood of money poured into the field, people have been disappointed to find that progress has not been as great as previously expected.

Drive.ai is also inevitably affected by this trend. After completing a round of financing of US $15 million in September 2017, Drive.ai has not received more financing for the next two years. In February this year, the original co-founder Wang Tao has left the company.

Meanwhile, word that Drive.ai was seeking a sale has been circulating in the industry since early 2019, with Apple showing the greatest interest among many potential acquirers approached by Drive.ai, according to a person familiar with the matter, specifically Apple's driverless technology division known as Project Titan.

But Apple's own autonomous driving division has been elusive. The division, which reportedly once had as many as 5000 people, showed Apple's ambition in driverless cars, and late last year, Apple recalled Doug Field, the former hardware executive who joined Tesla, to further convey its determination to advance the business.

But news earlier this year that Apple had fired nearly 200 employees in its autonomous driving division has created new uncertainty about the future of Apple's autonomous driving.

By April of this year, the news that Apple was preparing to acquire Drive.ai was further established. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple's acquisition target is mainly Drive.ai's autonomous driving-related talent, other hardware assets are not Apple's interest targets.

On June 25, a public document submitted to the California Department of Employment and Development officially unveiled the fate of Drive.ai, a four-year-old startup. Drive.ai will officially close its offices and lay off 90 employees on Friday.

At the same time, some former Drive.ai employees 'LinkedIn profile pages have changed to "Apple Special Projects Department."

According to public sources, Apple's acquisition of Drive.ai was completed on June 6, which was confirmed by Apple, which said it had hired "dozens of engineers" from Drive.ai, and the amount of the acquisition was not disclosed.

At this point, the independent development of a star start-up company is over, although in the case of bad environment, this is not a bad result, but it must not be consistent with the original goals set by Drive.ai, Wu Enda himself will focus on his other artificial intelligence projects, including a series of deep learning courses education platform Deeplearning.ai, and Landing.ai to provide artificial intelligence transformation services for enterprises.

This article is authorized to be reproduced from Weixin Official Accounts "Tengxu Technology"

Original title: "Drive.ai's birth, prosperity and gloomy departure"

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