Amazon announced on Friday that it will take over Zoox, a self-driving startup founded in 2014 that has raised nearly $ 1 billion in funding and aims to develop autonomous driving technologies, including vehicles, to create a full-stack solution to provide for driving. Hail.
According to Amazon's announcement, Zoox will continue to exist as an independent company. Current CEO Aicha Evans, CTO and co-founder Jesse Levinson remain in their roles. Your general corporate mission will remain the same, the release notes say. The value of the deal is $ 1.2 billion. According to the Financial Times.
News reports have stated that Amazon considers Zoox a potential acquisition target and that the deal is about to end.
Zoox has chosen one of the most expensive ways in the autonomous driving industry to build from the ground up a functional self-driving car along with the software and the AI end to provide its autonomous driving skills. Zoox has made some notable cost reductions over the past year and brought in Intel's Evans CEO in early 2019, probably with the aim of leveraging their experience to help the company commercialize.
The completion of the deal will enable Zoox to compete robustly in the field of autonomous vehicles, especially in front of the Google Alphabet-owned Waymo company.
Amazon has taken care of its automotive technology projects, and has used delivery robots in the last mile, which are six-wheel robots used to transport small parcels to customer homes. Amazon also invested in the independent start-up Aurora and tested Embark self-driving freight trucks.
The acquisition of Zoox specifically aims, according to Amazon, to help the startup "turn its vision of autonomous ride hail into reality," so that this does not appear to focus directly on Amazon's logistics activities for package delivery. However, Zoox’s basic technology, which includes the development of zero-emission vehicles built specifically for autonomous use, could easily be transferred to this side of the Amazon business.
If Zoox really stays on course in terms of passenger boarding, this could open up a whole new market for Amazon - one that would face Uber and Lyft directly once autonomous driving technology is mature.