Mobileye is now a public company, under the symbol MBLY.
Perhaps the high water mark of autonomous vehicle funding was Intel’s $15 billion acquisition of Mobileye in 2017. Other transactions were more speculative, like GM’s $600 million acquisition of Cruise, or Uber’s comparable acquisition of Otto, or Ford’s investment in Argo, or Waymo’s multiple outside funding rounds with valuations in the billions and then tens of billions of dollars.
But no single transaction was as big as the Intel acquisition. That one might be bigger than all the other transactions combined.
Five years later, Intel is spinning Mobileye back out, as a public company, at nearly the same valuation as the 2017 purchase price.
This is not a great look for Intel or for the autonomous driving industry, and plays right into a wave of stories about how much cash autonomous driving companies have consumed over the last decade.
But amid all the skepticism, it’s worth looking at Mobileye’s fundamentals. The company has 70% market share in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), with $1.4 billion in revenue, growing something like 30% year-over-year.
That’s a pretty great business. I imagine the market will come around on it.
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