Intel announced on Monday that Mobileye, a subsidiary in Israel that builds driver-assistance technology for major carmakers, will go public next year.
Intel will maintain majority ownership of Mobileye, the giant chip maker said, and the two companies will continue to collaborate on technologies for the automotive market. Mobileye’s executive team will remain in place after the initial public offering, with Amnon Shashua, one of the company’s founders, continuing as chief executive.
Intel acquired Mobileye in 2017 in a deal valued at $15.3 billion as part of a sweeping effort to expand into new markets. Founded in Jerusalem in 1999, Mobileye had become a major supplier of technology — including cameras, computer chips and software — that could help provide cars with automatic braking and lane-keeping features.
The company’s camera system was the key component of Autopilot, the driver-assistance system that the electric carmaker Tesla introduced in 2015. The partnership ended in acrimony the next year, with Tesla beginning to build many of the same technologies on its own. But Mobileye continued to work with other carmakers, including Audi.
Like Tesla, Mobileye has promoted its technologies as a path to autonomous vehicles. This year, the company announced that it was testing various self-driving car prototypes in major cities, including New York. But most experts believe that such vehicles are years — and perhaps decades — away from widespread use.
Mobileye’s business still centers on supplying camera-based systems for automatic braking, lane-keeping and other technologies that aid drivers. But the company has said it is expanding into other kinds of automobile sensors, including radar and lidar — “light detection and ranging” devices that measure distances using laser pulses and are a crucial part of most self-driving car projects.
