Intel Is Reportedly Acquiring Moovit

Intel is in talks to acquire Israeli mobility data startup Moovit for around $1 billion, the Israeli business daily Globes reported yesterday. This comes at a time when there’s not much mobility anywhere.

Moovit is the developer of a trip planning app that uses crowdsourced, real-time user data and company/city transit APIs. It’s similar to Waze, an Israeli company Google acquired in 2013; Waze cofounder Uri Levin serves as Moovit’s chairman.

Why is Intel interested? Intel is something of a self-driving dark horse. The company acquired Mobileye, an Israeli autonomous vehicle startup, for $15.3 billion in 2017.

• In January, Mobileye said it was supplying self-driving software, chips, and hardware to 70% of the road-ready cars with advanced automated driving features.

Intel is collecting and analyzing most of that driving data. Buying Moovit woud unlock a new set of data—trip logs and urban mobility patterns—that could help round out its self-driving stack. After all, autonomous vehicles have more utility if they can plug in city-level transit data.