Based at six locations in the United Kingdom, Five employs 140 associates working on the development of safe, self-driving vehicles. The financial details have not been disclosed and the acquisition remains subject to approval by the antitrust authorities.
“Automated driving is set to make road traffic safer. We want Five to give an extra boost to our work in software development for safe automated driving, and offer our customers European-made technology,” said Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the Bosch board of management and chairman of the Mobility Solutions business sector.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Five will become part of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division.
“Scale matters in building automated driving technology. Bosch is a global leader in driving assistance technologies, with core technologies and vast data lakes that will be essential in bringing safe self-driving systems to market. We’re excited for Five to become part of Europe’s most powerful SAE Level 4 player and to be a part of Bosch’s future success,” said Stan Boland, the CEO of Five.
Established in 2016, Five has built expertise in cloud software, safety assurance, robotics and machine learning, and has developed state-of-the-art software and artificial intelligence-based solutions for autonomous driving, through SAE Level 4.
The start-up now focuses primarily on a cloud-based development and testing platform for the software used in self-driving cars, offering engineers programmes necessary to create automated driving software at pace, and to test it before and during its deployment in test vehicles.
Five’s platform is able to analyse real data from a fleet of test vehicles, create advanced testing scenarios, and build a simulation environment that makes it possible to assess and validate system behaviour at hyper-scale.
According to Bosch, Five will strengthen its agile project structure for the development of self-driving cars. The two teams’ software engineering environments complement each other and will be merged to form a single solution.
“Five is the perfect fit for our engineering activities – not least due to its associates’ mindset and agile approach. This brings us closer to our aim of getting safe automated driving onto our roads,” says Dr. Mathias Pillin, president of the Bosch Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division. For Bosch, moreover, the acquisition is a further step toward consolidating its market position in software and automated driving.
The company recently acquired Atlatec, a specialist in the field of high-resolution digital maps, meaning that Bosch is one of just a few companies that are able to offer customers all the necessary building blocks of automated driving – from actuators, sensors, and maps to software and the engineering environment.