Mobileye

What the company does

Mobileye builds vision systems for cars: a camera, a chip and software that together detect vehicles and the road, and use what they see to support driver-assistance features and, in newer products, driving that does not require hands on the wheel. The hardware at the centre of this is EyeQ, a family of systems-on-chip (SoCs) — processors designed specifically for the image processing a car needs, rather than general-purpose computing chips.^[1]

Origins

Mobileye was founded in 1999 by Prof. Amnon Shashua, who turned his academic research at the Hebrew University into a monocular vision system for detecting vehicles.^[1] Monocular here means working from a single camera rather than from a combination of sensors; the difficulty is that a flat image has to be turned into a reliable judgement about where other cars are and how far away they are.

Shashua formed the founding team with Ziv Aviram and Norio Ichihashi, splitting the work by function: Aviram took operations, finance and investor relations, and Ichihashi covered the Asian market.^[1]

Designing its own chip

In 2001 the company decided to design its own system-on-chip for computer vision. The first chip, EyeQ1, was made on a 180-nanometre process and sampled in 2004.^[1] Choosing to build custom silicon is a costly and slow route for a young company, but it let Mobileye tune the hardware to its own algorithms and to the power and cost limits of a car, instead of running those algorithms on whatever processor happened to be available.

Public markets and Intel

Mobileye went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.^[1] In March 2017 Intel announced a definitive agreement to acquire the company for 63.54 dollars per share in cash, a fully diluted equity value of about 15.3 billion dollars.^[4] Intel announced on 8 August 2017 that it had completed its tender offer for Mobileye shares.^[3]

After the acquisition Ziv Aviram retired and Amnon Shashua became chief executive, while also taking a senior vice president role at Intel.^[1] The combination paired Mobileye's vision stack with a large chipmaker's manufacturing and computing resources, at a time when the industry was beginning to treat driving automation as a computing problem as much as an automotive one.

Independent again

Mobileye says it has been listed independently from Intel since 2022, with Intel retaining majority ownership.^[2] That return to the public markets was a Nasdaq offering, priced at 21 dollars per share.^[5]

Scale and product line

By the company's own count the technology is in wide use. Through 2025 more than 230 million vehicles worldwide had been built with Mobileye EyeQ technology inside,^[2] and Mobileye's milestone list records over 200 million EyeQ systems-on-chip shipped by 2025.^[1] The two figures count different things — vehicles carrying the technology, and chips sold — so they are not meant to match.

The product line runs from base ADAS through Surround ADAS and SuperVision to Chauffeur and Drive, the last aimed at robotaxis and other driverless vehicles.^[1] ADAS, or advanced driver assistance systems, covers features that support a human driver rather than replace the driver; the higher tiers in the list move progressively toward vehicles that drive themselves.

In 2026 Mobileye acquired Mentee Robotics.^[1]

Where it sits

Mobileye sits in an unusual place in the industry: a company whose chips are already in a very large installed base of ordinary cars, while its newer products reach toward robotaxis and other vehicles without drivers.^[1] The company's history runs from a university research project, through custom silicon, a first listing, acquisition by a chipmaker, and a return to the public markets — a path shaped at each step by the decision to own the vision stack from sensor to chip.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}