JERUSALEM (VINnews) — International silicon chip giant Intel has announced that it is completing the purchase of Israeli transit data company Moovit in a deal worth approximately $1 billion ,according to a report by Israeli business site TheMarker. This is the second investment by Intel in Israel in the past few months after it purchased Israeli AI chip developer Habana Labs at the end of last year for 2 billion dollars.
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Headquartered in Ness Ziona, Moovit was founded in 2012 by Nir Erez, Yaron Evron, and Roy Bick and developed the first free crowd-sourced app that provides real-time bus, train, subway, and light rail schedules and offers route options to help users find the quickest, most efficient way to their destinations.
Today, Moovit has over 750 million users on its free mobile and web app, providing mobility options in 3,100 cities, 100 countries, and in 45 languages.
In addition to its public transportation data features, Moovit’s mobility options are quite extensive and include ride-hailing companies (Uber, Lyft, Gett), car-sharing companies (Zipcar, Car2Go), station-based bike-share systems (CitiBike), dockless bikes (JUMP, Mobike), scooters (Circ, Voi, Lyft Scooters, Skip, and others) and Mopeds (Coup, eCooltra, MiMoto).
The company also sells transit data analytics to municipalities and public transport operators through its Smart Transit Suite, a platform that provides real-time information on people’s movement, optimal routes, wait times, locations of buses and trains and other data for network managing.
In February 2018, Intel led a $50 million investment in Moovit and announced a partnership with Mobileye, the Jerusalem-based tech company that develops cutting-edge driving-assistance technologies and which was acquired by Intel in 2017 for over $15 billion – the biggest exit by an Israeli company to date. Mobileye co-founder Professor Amnon Shashua, the senior vice president at Intel Corporation, became a member of Moovit’s board of directors as part of the deal.
Moovit has raised over $130 million to date. Investors have included Sequoia Capital Israel, BMW i Ventures, and NGP Capital, a VC firm based in Palo Alto.
During the global pandemic over the past months, Moovit launched an emergency service for transit agencies, operators, and enterprises to get critical workers to their destination without putting their health or that of others at risk. The solution is implemented by large corporations in a number of cities to shuttle employees safely to work, Moovit said last month.
In February, Moovit launched a new AR (Augmented Reality) feature to better locate stops and stations (and not get on the wrong bus going the other direction). It places digital directions and signs on top of the camera view to help users locate correct bus stops, subway entrances, and offers overall extra guidance.