Five raises $41M in Series B funding to tackle the biggest challenges in self-driving
Five, the UK self-driving company, has raised $41M in a Series B round of equity funding. New investors are Trustbridge Partners, Direct Line Group and Sistema_VC. Existing investors Lakestar, Amadeus Capital Partners, Kindred Capital and Notion Capital also participated in the round, which makes Five one of Europe’s best-funded self-driving startups, with $77M raised to date.
Five autonomous vehicle
This latest round of funding will be used to productize these vital offline cloud-based development platforms alongside high-value components of Five’s online vehicle software. Together, these will provide global partners with the means to bring needed performance and engineering certainty to their self-driving programs and deliver the assurance evidence required for their safety cases, both of which will be essential for meaningful public road deployments and the widespread commercialisation of self-driving technology.
Five’s founding team has collectively built businesses that have sold for more than $1 bn, and the company has established close ties with some of the world’s leading academic institutions. With origins in the communications chip industry, Five’s founders are experts in the use of cutting-edge tools and techniques to verify deep technology, including finding and addressing residual bugs in high-complexity silicon and software. The team is now applying this knowledge to the challenges of self-driving, which it is well on track to solving.
Stan Boland
Five’s co-founder and CEO
This funding round is validation of the work we are doing and the role our technology is set to contribute to developing and assuring self-driving. We’re excited to be able to accelerate development and engagements with partners. Our shareholders have large and complementary contributions to make to that progress, and we are delighted to welcome Trustbridge, Direct Line Group and Sistema VC to our cap table. We look forward to their support on the next stage of our journey.
This funding round is validation of the work we are doing and the role our technology is set to contribute to developing and assuring self-driving. We’re excited to be able to accelerate development and engagements with partners. Our shareholders have large and complementary contributions to make to that progress, and we are delighted to welcome Trustbridge, Direct Line Group and Sistema VC to our cap table. We look forward to their support on the next stage of our journey.
We are still years away from a time when fully-autonomous cars will be able to drive us from A to B, and the complexity of getting to that point is likely going to need hundreds of billions of dollars of investment before it becomes a reality.
That hard truth is leading to some shifts in the self-driving startup landscape. In the latest move, England’s Five (formerly known as FiveAI), one of the more ambitious companies in the space in Europe, is moving away from its original plan, of designing its own fully self-driving cars, and then running fleets of them in its own transportation service. Instead, it now plans to license its technology — starting with software to help test and measure the accuracy of a vehicle’s driving systems — that it has created to others building autonomous cars as well as the wider service ecosystem that will exist around that. As part of that pivot, today it’s also announcing a fresh $41 million in funding.
Five has raised $41 million in venture capital as the startup seeks to turn the self-driving research it has conducted into commercial products and services.
The U.K.-based startup has created a technology stack to power autonomous vehicles. The company uses AI and machine learning that would let cars use simpler maps to navigate their surroundings. By reducing the complexity of the technological challenges, the company hopes to accelerate the deployment of autonomous vehicles.
