Apple acquires self-driving car startup Drive.ai

Kaveh Waddell/Axios

Apple’s latest purchase can be considered more as an acqui-hire. The company just bought Mountain View-based autonomous driving startup Drive.ai. They’ve hired dozens of the company’s engineers and Drive.ai has ceased all operations throughout the last few weeks. Rumours of Apple buying Drive.ai was going around earlier this month, suggesting that the company wanted to boost the development of its own self-driving vehicle system. And from the looks of it, Apple is looking at the company so it could bring in its employees.

Drive.ai was founded back in 2015 by a group of Stanford University students who wanted to introduce a self-driving shuttle service in select cities in Texas. But the company ran into problems and sought out a buyer, which we now know is Apple. Axios didn’t say how much Apple bought Drive.ai for, but the company took on the new hires into its engineering and product design divisions. The move confirms that Apple is still working on its Apple Car project, despite laying off 190 employees from its self-driving car division as part of a restructuring effort.