Foresight Articles

As reported by The Verge on March 12th, Waymo’s first external fundraising round, initially expected to bring in $2.25 billion for the self-driving company, just grew to $3 billion, thanks to the addition of some new investors.

On March 2nd, Waymo announced its first outside investment round, with investors including Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mubadala Investment Company, Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, and Waymo’s parent company Alphabet.

That round was extended to include a new crop of investors: funds managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Perry Creek Capital, and Fidelity Management and Research Company.

“COVID-19 has underscored how fully self-driving technology can provide safe and hygienic personal mobility and delivery services,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a statement.

On May 4th, Intel moved deeper into the world of smart mobility and autonomous driving by announcing its plan to acquire Israel-based urban transit data startup Moovit for $900 million.

Moovit’s principle product is an urban mobility app with a particular focus on public transportation, which is used by hundreds of millions of customers. It uses public transit data to provide route planning in the vein of Google’s and Apple’s mapping apps, as well as scooter- and bike-sharing services and ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft. But because it relies partly on crowdsourced data, Moovit can also provide routing for areas where no publicly released data is available. The app is used by 800 million customers and services 3,100 cities across 102 countries, Intel said.

Intel said its acquisition of Moovit brings it closer to achieving its plan to “become a complete mobility provider, including robotaxi services, which is forecast to be an estimated $160 billion opportunity by 2030.”

The industry news this month has provided a major boost to the autonomous vehicle industry and shares of Foresight Autonomous Holdings (FRSX) have more than doubled in price since the beginning of the month. Institutional ownership in Foresight Autonomous Holdings has increased based on the 13G filed by Ionic Ventures, a 9.66% owner, filed on May 4, 2020. A link to the 13G can be found here: 

This is an exciting time for the industry as well as for Foresight Autonomous Holdings. The recently announced sale of a prototype of the Company’s QuadSight® four-camera vision system to a leading, multi-billion dollar European Tier One supplier of subsystems for rail and commercial vehicles, specializing in autonomous trucking technology provided additional validation for the Company.