Bosch swallows start-up Five

With its second acquisition within a short period of time, the Group aims to drive forward the development of self-driving cars.

Bosch is buying the British start-up Five. The companies signed the contract at the beginning of April and agreed not to disclose the purchase price. For Bosch, the acquisition is a move to consolidate its market position in software and automated driving. Just recently, Bosch bought Atlatec GmbH, a provider of high-resolution digital maps. With the purchases, Bosch aims to become the only company that can offer all the building blocks from sensors to maps for automated driving.

"Automated driving should above all make road traffic safer. To this end, we want to gain further momentum with Five in software development and offer our customers technology 'made in Europe,'" Bosch CEO Markus Heyn said of the acquisition.

Founded in 2016, the start-up Five develops solutions for automated driving using software and artificial intelligence. The company employs 140 people at six locations in the UK. With the help of the Five platform, real data from a fleet of test vehicles can be analyzed and a wide variety of test scenarios can be created, enabling the evaluation and validation of system behavior. The tests will be used to further develop the software.