There is More to Our Moovit Acquisition Than Meets the Eye

Professor Amnon Shashua

Senior vice president at Intel Corporation, president and chief executive officer of Mobileye, an Intel company.

By Amnon Shashua

We are thrilled to welcome Moovit to the Intel family. Moovit is the world’s best-known transit application that aggregates data from multiple transit partners and customers. With more than 800 million users globally, Moovit collects more than 6 billion data points daily about traffic flow and user demand across more than 3,100 cities in 102 countries and serves more than 7,500 public transit operators. Quite an achievement.

The natural question is why Intel? This is where Mobileye, an Intel company, completes the puzzle.

More: Autonomous Driving at Intel | Mobileye News | Intel Acquires Moovit to Accelerate Mobileye’s Mobility-as-a-Service Offering (News Release) | Moovit + Mobileye = revolutionize urban mobility! (Moovit Blog)

Mobileye is Intel’s arm to foray into the future of transportation. The future of mobility relies on compute and lots of it. We are engaged in designing the most high-density and efficient silicon; cutting-edge algorithms involving artificial intelligence for interpreting sensing data from cameras, radars and lidars; and algorithms for decision-making for autonomous cars all wrapped around unprecedented safety models. While doing so, we are engaged in saving lives through our leading position in driver-assistance systems with nearly 60 million cars equipped with our silicon and algorithms preventing and mitigating accidents every day.

Going forward, all this technology will be integrated into a mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) business – an opportunity estimated to be worth $160 billion by 2030. We have contracts and partnerships around the globe targeting 2022 debut of various manifestations of MaaS.

We have dedicated significant efforts to study the nature of the business:  the value chain formations, the societal and economical pain-points of the urban mobility systems, and the path to weave driverless capabilities into the existing urban transportation fabric.

» Download Mobility-as-a-Service Stack infographic

We developed a multimodal XaaS strategy that will enable Intel through Mobileye, and now including Moovit, to create a value proposition out of every layer of the solution stack – from the self-driving system as standalone, all the way up to the robotaxi service and experience. This strategy is very nuanced and differs from every other company in this space.

The first critical asset is Mobility Intelligence based on data-driven real-time demand and supply insights allowing for driverless technology to be surgically introduced through various service models such as origin-to-destination, first/last mile and dynamically routed shuttles.

The second critical asset is the transit operators’ operational expertise. This is a core asset to be harnessed through collaborative go-to-market models. Two such canonical models include vehicle-as-a-service (VaaS) and ride-as-a-service (RaaS). In particular, RaaS enables an existing service operator to “summon” an automated mobility solution to cater for un-addressable demand under its service umbrella. VaaS, on the other hand, is a further integrated model in which we offer a dedicated fleet of autonomous vehicles/shuttles to be acquired and assimilated into the transit operator’s backbone and control center together with the Mobility Intelligence software, which assures efficient use of that capital.

With today’s acquisition of Moovit, we have added another critical piece to our mobility stack and accelerated our way towards becoming a complete mobility provider. Beyond the obvious value of Moovit’s data and user base, the company owns underlying assets, capabilities and a partners network that will enable us to turn on affordable and demand-optimized driverless mobility services almost anywhere in the world.

As in Mobileye’s case, Moovit will remain an independent subsidiary propelling its core business forward. Being a part of Intel has empowered Mobileye to dream beyond computer vision and into the driverless future, and now we intend to empower Moovit to dream bigger, reach higher and, together, make an impact on the future of transportation.

Professor Amnon Shashua is senior vice president at Intel Corporation and president and chief executive officer of Mobileye, an Intel company.