Apple is about to acquire the Drive.ai firm and brings the sum of its engineering wisdom to improve Apple own self driving efforts. There are more than a hundred startups which are pursuing self-driving cars. Among them, Drive.ai has a small fleet of test shuttles in Texas. But they have informed to the regulators of California, that it has plans to lay off 90 employees in a permanent closure as per the reports of the San Francisco Chronicle. It is usual in Silicon Valley for the larger companies to acquire struggling startups to hire the engineers and this movie is called acqui-hire in the industry.
The efforts of Apple are clear to compete Rivals such as Alphabets Inc's Waymo which is also in the process of developing driving vehicles. In the process, Apple has brought former Tesla Inc engineering chief Doug Field to supervise the operation which includes more than 5000 workers. Presently Apple is working on the process of creating key components that include sensors and also discussions with various potential suppliers.
Previously the release date of such a car from Apple was scheduled for the year 2020. In between, there should have been a flux for the delay. However, this present deal with Drive.ai has confirmed the continued interest of Apple in self-driving Cars software. The information about the Purchase price is clueless. But according to the pitch book data Drive.ai has raised 77 million dollars in venture funding at a 200 million Dollars valuation.