Dive Brief:
- An arm of Hyundai Motors, Hyundai CRADLE Tel Aviv, announced a strategic investment in allegro.ai, an Israel-based company working on deep learning-based computer vision to bring artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to its business areas, including autonomous vehicles (AVs).
- Allegro.ai, founded in 2016, focuses on deep learning for computer vision, with an end-to-end lifecycle management solution that can be applied to autonomous vehicles, drones, security and other applications.
- This marks the division's fifth investment in an Israeli company. Ruby Chen, head of office at Hyundai CRADLE Tel Aviv, said the move "is a further step in enhancing our presence in the Israeli market, a global leader of technological innovation in the fields of automation, artificial intelligence and deep learning."
Dive Insight:
The investment is, in part, meant to bolster the safety of AVs and to improve navigation and real-time decision making. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that takes multiple data points to project different outcomes or answers, different than symbolic AI that programs machines to understand the world humans do.
The investment marks yet another move by an automaker into the AI and tech space, as automakers seek out advanced systems that can bolster their autonomous vehicles. Ford made a splash last year with a $1 billion investment in Argo AI over five years, part of the support for its AV arm. Companies like Microsoft and Japanese tech giant SoftBank have also found partnerships with automakers and mobility companies, as they seek out advanced learning systems.
A January report by McKinsey & Company said there was “a substantial, industry-wide artificial intelligence-enabled opportunity,” with the potential for up to $215 billion a year for automotive manufacturers worldwide by 2025. The move into AI, they said, would not just support AVs, but mobility services in general as automakers seek to move into broader mobility companies.
