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

Produced by the editorial department of big data Digest

Once valued at 200 million US dollars, Wu Enda and his wife personally stood on the platform, and Drive.ai, a popular unmanned car startup, collapsed.

On the 20th of this month, Mountain View, Calif.-based Drive.ai was confirmed to have submitted a notice to a state government agency that it was closing and laid off 90 employees, including CEO.

At 9: 00 p.m. on June 25, Apple confirmed to the technology media Axios and The Verge that it had confirmed its acquisition of Drive.ai for an unknown amount.

It is understood that Apple is preparing to hire a group of hardware and software engineers from the remaining employees of Drive.ai, which also seems to be a new attempt in Apple's mysterious driverless car plan.

Five former employees of Drive.ai have changed their profiles on LinkedIn, saying they will leave Drive.ai in June and join Apple. Four of the employees listed "special projects" in their job titles. These employees include data, systems and software engineers.

As early as three weeks ago, two people familiar with the situation told the media that Apple had plans to buy Drive.ai in order to recruit its engineering talent to promote Apple's self-driving vehicle system, Titan.

In fact, being acquired by Apple is a good home for the moribund startup, but it's not clear how long Drive.ai will survive at Apple or whether the startup's massive layoffs will go smoothly on Friday as scheduled.

According to Axios sources, Apple will buy the company's assets, including self-driving cars, but both Axios and Canada's Asia-Pacific Post have indicated that Apple has chosen to hire engineers directly from Drive.ai, and other workers may not be able to be picked up.

Star startups with their own halo on the stage

The hasty end of the extremely windy Drive.ai may be a result that many people did not expect.

In 2015, machine learning researchers at Stanford University founded Drive.ai. One of the co-founders of Drive.ai is Wu Enda's wife, Carol Reiley.

In early 2017, at the Emtech Digital conference hosted by MIT Technology Review, Drive.ai, which has kept a low profile and mysterious since its inception, made its public debut.

Unlike self-driving companies such as Tesla, which build their own vehicles, Drive.ai is committed to producing software engineering packages for after-sale cars. Through AI's technology, their software engineering packages can transform conventionally produced cars into self-driving cars.

With the addition of Andrew Ng, the former chief scientist of Baidu, Volkswagen's focus on the startup has reached the most exciting part.

After two years of polishing, Drive.ai 's technology is said to have iterated to the fourth generation, reaching the L4 level, that is, highly automated fully autopilot.

Drive.ai completed 50 million of round B financing in June 2017. At that time, it was only a year after round A financing.

In May last year, Wu Enda sent an open letter saying that Drive.ai would start offering self-driving car services to the public in Frisco, Texas, in July 2018, and has begun a pilot project to let the public imagine the landing of self-driving technology.

The PPT content that Wu Enda showed to the municipal staff in May last year.

Two months later, Drive.ai officially began its self-driving commercial attempt, that is, the self-driving car-hailing service was officially opened in Frisco, Texas, USA, which is similar to the driverless version of Uber, where users summon Drive.ai vehicles to pick up and pick up, but the route is relatively fixed, it is a pre-planned route, and the boarding and getting off places are also fixed.

At that time, the company had reached 120 people and had its own core technologies in sensor fusion, cognition, decision planning, positioning, offline simulation and other sub-modules.

As of September 2017, Drive.ai had completed five rounds of financing totaling $77 million, valuing it at $200m.

But a series of autopilot accidents, as well as the gap between autopilot expectations and reality, make investors gradually realize the reality: full sense of autopilot will not be realized soon.

Drive.ai 's funding chain has also been affected. Since the financing in September 17, Drive.ai has not received any more financing for the next two years, and in February, former co-founder Wang Jie was revealed to have left the company.

With regard to Apple's acquisition of Drive.ai, there were signs at the beginning of this year, and there was a real hammer in April this year. According to a person familiar with the matter, Apple's acquisition is mainly aimed at Drive.ai 's self-driving talent, and other hardware assets are not targets that Apple is interested in.

On Friday, Drive.ai will officially close its office and lay off 90 employees. The star startup company that has been established for four years has come to an end.

Self-driving in the pre-dawn darkness

"people always overestimate the short-term benefits of a technology, but underestimate its long-term impact."

-- Roy Amara

Hype Cycle (Technology maturity Curve) is a visual representation of the excitement and maturity of manufacturing technology, which was originally proposed by Gartner, as shown in the following figure:

Since its emergence, self-driving technology has gone through the peak of contention among a hundred schools of thought, but now it seems to be in the trough of "disillusionment".

Investors have invested billions of dollars in self-driving technology, and many of them have shortened timetables to save costs or face technical challenges. Many experts believe that self-driving cars are still years, even decades away from full deployment. At the same time, many large companies engaged in the technology are focusing on working with partners to spread the huge costs to more companies.

Despite the acquisition of drive AI, Apple's own self-driving project, Titan, has not been going well, and in January, NBC reported that Apple had laid off 200 Titan employees. The initial goal of the program was to develop autopilot hardware and software, but later reduced to developing only software.

Last year, Apple hired Doug Field, Tesla's chief automotive engineer, in what Apple officials described as an integration and restructuring, and the acquisition may also be part of Apple's integration of its autopilot system.

And the entire self-driving car market, like Apple, is going through a difficult process of consolidation and restructuring.

Related reports:

Https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18758820/drive-ai-self-driving-startup-shutting-down-apple

Https://www.axios.com/apple-buy-driveai-753da17d-60fe-44f9-84ff-1d2d82cd0b81.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic

Https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Drive-ai-a-self-driving-car-startup-once-worth-14047625.php?psid=bDMRr

Https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18195598/apple-project-titan-200-employees-dismissed

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