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Toyota’s autonomous driving unit has acquired Carmera, an American mapping start-up, when the Japanese group embarks on a software purchase to try to quadruple its global engineering workforce over the next few years.
Carmera, based in New York, is the second acquisition of Woven Planet after its purchase Acquisition of $ 550 million of Lyft’s autonomous driving unit in April. Backed by the world’s largest carmaker’s war chest, the Toyota subsidiary said it would “rise” to establish its global footprint in software.
Although Carmera’s acquisition price was not disclosed, the deal along with Lyft’s will expand Woven Planet’s workforce to more than 1,200.
“I’m looking to double or quadruple Woven Planet in the next two years,” James Kuffner, the head of the unit who also serves on Toyota’s board as digital digital director, said in an interview.
“This means that we will hire, acquire, aggressively partner and, if logical, incorporate companies from the Woven Planet group that are complementary and strategic,” he added.
Created in 2015, Carmera was valued at $ 120 million later raised $ 20 million in a Series B funding led by Google’s GV risk arm in 2018, according to Pitchbook.
Truck manufacturers and technology groups compete to develop in real time and accuracy digital mapping technologies, which are considered essential for the expansion of cars with automatic driving.
Building on an existing partnership, Toyota hopes to combine Carmera’s machine learning and geospatial technologies with its own mapping capabilities using aerial and satellite imagery.
Mapping is an important investment area for Woven Planet, as Toyota wants to move from the simple sale of cars to the provision of mobility services in the era of autonomous driving.
Instead of using specialized vehicles equipped with sophisticated cameras and radars, Woven Planet and Carmera have been experimenting with the use of affordable components in regular cars so they can recognize changes in lane markings and other road features to collect data from maps.
“The unfortunate truth is that right now a lot of in-vehicle mapping technology requires expensive equipment and unfortunately as soon as the data is collected, it’s not up to date because the world doesn’t stay static,” Kuffner said.
He added that Toyota was well positioned to create a system that could provide quality and up-to-date map data, as it already had 100 million cars on the road.
But analysts say Woven Planet, which was created in January, faces a major challenge in building Toyota’s software capacity after decades focused on mass production of hardware.
“We get this opportunity when some other companies reduce their efforts to really double and grow,” Kuffner said. “I would like to grow aggressively fast but not too fast that we lose our culture or our focus.”
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