Awesome recruitment

Usually, we always pay attention to those enterprises that start to manufacture electric vehicles. In fact, there is another field that has been quite lively in recent years, and a large number of startup companies have gathered-autonomous driving.

Like electric cars, this is also an entrepreneurial field that burns a lot of money, but I don't know when I can make money. And people who can start a business in this field are super brains in the field of artificial intelligence.

No matter how smart people get together to start a business, they may not succeed. Just like Drive.ai, a self-driving startup that brings together the elites of Stanford University's ai lab, it is not allowed to sell to Apple at a low price before it goes bankrupt.

Two years ago, Drive.ai was a $200 million star startup, which was called one of the most promising autonomous driving startups by the industry.

Most of its founding team members are from Stanford AI Lab, and they are all closely related to one person-Andrew Ng, a great figure in the global AI field. We are probably most familiar with his former status as "Chief Scientist of Baidu", but there are many awesome titles on others, such as "Father of Google Brain".

This Drive.ai was founded by Wu's beautiful wife Carol Reiley (doctor of medicine and computer science) and Wu's disciples at Stanford.

Here is a collection of super-brain startups in the AI field, which was established on 20 15, but achieved remarkable results. Judging from the released test video, the L4-class autonomous driving technology they have studied has made the vehicle unmanned in complex road conditions such as rain, night and peak hours.

In addition to technical strength, Drive.ai is also very advanced in commercialization. On October 20 17, the landing test of the autopilot network car was started. They were already in San Francisco and Texas. By the end of 2065438+September 2007, Drive.ai had completed five rounds of financing totaling 77 million US dollars, with a valuation exceeding 200 million US dollars.

However, the company did not disclose any new financing information afterwards. Until March of this year, it suddenly came out that they were looking for the next company to take over. At the same time, the former elite founder team has already dispersed, and everyone is looking for a new way out.

Three months later, Drive.ai finally found the only company that is said to be interested in taking over-Apple, and it was not a real acquisition, but a "recruitment" acquisition. In other words, brands are unnecessary, leaving only some useful talents and some patented technologies.

This star company started its business for four years, and finally had to disband its team, close down and go to Apple to bring skills to work. As for the purchase price, Apple has not disclosed it. Some media said that this is at least equivalent to its financing amount of $77 million, but Gene Munster, a famous Apple analyst, speculated that Apple would give up $35 million at most.

A company with a valuation of $200 million was sold for tens of millions in the end, which was embarrassing. In fact, this result is not bad, at least before the failure of the venture is announced, some people are willing to take over.

Gene Munster believes that the former self-driving stars are now sold at a discount, which indicates that there will be more similar "integration" cases in the field of self-driving. At best, it is acquired, at worst, it is waiting to be acquired.

Also this week, another startup, Mighty AI, which makes training data on autonomous driving computer vision technology, was acquired by Uber. The same purchase price was not disclosed, but at least it was officially acquired and both parties made official announcements.

The business of this five-year-old company is also booming. Samsung Electronics, Microsoft, Intel and Siemens are all its customers. However, it still can't escape the fate of being acquired by industry giants.

In fact, there are too few startups in the field of self-driving, and being acquired by big companies is the best destination for most companies.

In 20 16, General Motors acquired Cruise for 10 billion dollars, and in 20 17, Delphi acquired nuTonomy for 450 million dollars. These are quite successful cases.

If you don't want to be acquired and continue to develop independently, ok, you have to be quite strong, even stronger than Wu's team. For example, in Auror, the three founders are Chris Urmson, former head of Google Autopilot Project, Sterling Anderson, former head of Tesla Autopilot Project, and Drew Bagnell, former head of Uber Autopilot Project.

With this team, Amazon and Sequoia Capital line up to vote for you. Less than three years after its establishment, it has received an investment of 700 million US dollars, with a valuation of more than 2.5 billion US dollars.

With this confidence, the public can't buy you, and cooperation can't be bought at all. After breaking up with Volkswagen, Hyundai Motor and Fiat Chrysler immediately came to the door to cooperate and seek contact.

Other 99.9 startups can only practice their internal skills silently, hoping that one day they will be attracted by Apple, Google and Amazon, which are holding huge amounts of cash. This is the happiest ending.