Mountain View startup Drive.ai, which made kits to turn regular cars into autonomous ones, will shut its office in June and lay off 90 workers in a permanent closure of its business, according to a filing with a state agency.
At the same time, Apple has hired a handful of hardware and software engineers from Drive.ai, in what appears to be part of a renewed effort by the iPhone and Mac maker to branch out into self-driving cars.
Three weeks ago, Apple was said to be exploring a purchase of Drive.ai, a deal that would let Apple pick up dozens of Drive.ai engineers while eliminating a competitor from the market.
So far, five former Drive.ai employees have changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they left Drive.ai in June and joined Apple the same month. Four of those workers list “special projects” in their job titles. Those employees include data, systems and software engineers.
Adrian Fine, director of communications and policy at Drive.ai, declined to comment on the closure when reached by phone. A spokesman from Apple did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Drive.ai plans to close its Mountain View office by Friday. The cuts include chief executive officer, Bijit Halder, and its directors of finance and robotics, a company official said in a June 12 letter sent to California’s Employment Development Department.
The notice said the company’s situation could change “due to subsequent events beyond Drive.ai’s control or current knowledge,” wrote Thomas Yih, the company’s general counsel. Yih did not respond to a request for comment.
Co-founder Sameep Tandon, who began writing software for autonomous cars while a student at Stanford, said on his LinkedIn profile that he had left the company in June. Another co-founder, Tao Wang, marked himself as having left in February.
Drive.ai set itself apart from its competition by making equipment that could be added to existing cars and trucks. The kit combined radar, cameras and laser-based sensors called lidar to feed data into its software.
The company, which was last valued at around $200 million two years ago, argued that it was one of few futuristic ride services already serving the public.
It partnered with the city of Arlington, Texas, last year to offer residents a shuttle service that used self-driving cars to transport them on a fixed route that included AT&T Stadium and the Convention Center. The company also tested the service in the Dallas suburb of Frisco. The Frisco test concluded at the end of March when Drive.ai’s contract with the city ended, according to Automotive News. The Arlington program ended on May 31, a spokeswoman for the Texas city said. Drive.ai requested that the one-year pilot program end early, instead of running through October as planned, according to the spokeswoman.
In 2017, Drive.ai said it would provide Lyft with robot taxis, with Drive.ai test engineers at the wheel. The program was expected to start in the Bay Area soon after the September announcement, but it’s unclear if the program got off the ground.
Drive.ai raised $77 million from GGV Capital, New Enterprise Associates, the corporate venture arm of Nvidia and others, since its founding in 2015.
Its most recent funding round was in September 2017, led by one of Asia’s biggest ride-hailing companies, Grab. At the time, Drive.ai said it planned to open an office in Singapore and offer its services there. A search of LinkedIn Tuesday revealed no Drive.ai employees in Singapore and a Singapore business database showed no entities named “Drive.ai.”
The company started looking for potential buyers early this year, according to a report in industry news site the Information. It found an interested party in Apple, which has about 5,000 employees working on its secretive self-driving car program, called Project Titan.
The tech firm has never said publicly if it seeks to build a whole vehicle or the equipment that makes a car autonomous, such as the sensors, computer system or software.
But last year’s rehiring of Tesla engineer Doug Field, who previously worked on computer hardware at Apple, suggested to some close observers that it wants to develop cars, not just the parts to control them.
Early this year, Apple laid off 190 workers — mostly hardware and software engineers, according to a filing with a state agency — as part of a restructuring under its new leadership.
But more recently, Apple has appeared to scale up hiring for autonomous vehicles. Job listings at Apple that contain the keyword “autonomous” have increased from 26 positions at the start of the year to 35 in June, said James Mattone, an associate editor at data startup Thinknum, which uses job listings to find hiring trends.
Enthusiasm for self-driving vehicles among investors, politicians and the public has waxed and waned in recent years. The death of a pedestrian by a self-driving Uber vehicle in Arizona last year dented public confidence, and executives have soft-pedaled bold predictions about the capabilities of cars to become completely self-driving. But well-funded companies like Cruise, Waymo and Tesla have continued with their plans to roll out fleets of autonomous vehicles.
Sophia Kunthara and Melia Russell are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: sophia.kunthara@sfchronicle.com, melia.russell@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SophiaKunthara, @meliarobin