Apple intends to acquire Drive.ai. Is this a move to enter the autonomous driving industry?

The layoffs include Chief Executive Officer Bijit Halder and directors of her finance and robotics divisions, a company executive said in a letter to California’s Employment Development Department.

According to foreign media reports, documents submitted by Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup, to regulators recently show that the company plans to close its office at the end of June, lay off 90 employees and permanently shut down its business. The company mainly develops toolkits designed to help transform ordinary cars into self-driving cars.

Meanwhile, Apple has hired several hardware and software engineers from Drive.ai, in what appears to be the latest effort by the iPhone and Mac maker to expand its self-driving car business. Three weeks ago, Apple reportedly tried to acquire Drive.ai, a deal that would have brought in dozens of Drive.ai engineers while keeping potential competitors out of the market.

Martin Vega inspects Drive.ai's self-driving car software

So far, five former Drive.ai employees have changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they left the company in June and joined Apple that same month. Four of them listed "special projects" in their job titles. The employees included data, systems engineers and software engineers.

Robin Cha tests a car at Drive.ai, a company Apple reportedly recently expressed interest in acquiring

Adrian Fine, Drive.ai's head of communications and policy, declined to comment on the closure. An Apple spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Drive.ai plans to close its Mountain View office by Friday. The layoffs include Chief Executive Officer Bijit Halder and directors of her finance and robotics divisions, a company executive said in a June 12 letter to California’s Employment Development Department.

The company’s situation is subject to change “due to subsequent events that are beyond Drive.ai’s control or current knowledge,” wrote Thomas Yeh, the company’s general counsel. Yeh didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Drive.ai co-founder Sameep Tandon, who began writing software for self-driving cars while a student at Stanford University, said on his LinkedIn profile that he left the company in June. Another co-founder, Wang Tao, said he left in February.

Drive.ai differentiates itself from the competition by making a kit that can be added to existing cars and trucks. The kit combines radar, cameras and laser sensors (called lidar) to feed data into its software. The company, which was valued at about $200 million two years ago, says it is one of the few ride-hailing services that is already offering its future service to the public.

Last year, Drive.ai partnered with the city of Arlington, Texas, to offer a commuter service to residents, using self-driving cars to ferry them on fixed routes around the city, including AT&T Stadium and the convention center. The company has also tested the service in Frisco, a suburb of Dallas.

The San Francisco test reportedly ended in late March, when Drive.ai’s contract with the city ended. A Texas spokeswoman said the Arlington project ended on May 31. According to the spokeswoman, Drive.ai asked to end the one-year pilot program early, rather than in October as planned.

In 2017, Drive.ai said it would provide robot taxis for Lyft, with Drive.ai test engineers behind the wheel. The project was expected to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area shortly after the September announcement, but it is unclear if it has yet to be implemented.

Drive.ai co-founder Sameep Tandon recently updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he has left the company.

Drive.ai has raised $77 million in funding since its founding in 2015 from venture arms of GGV Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Nvidia and others.

Its most recent funding round was in September 2017, led by Grab, one of Asia's largest ride-hailing companies. At the time, Drive.ai said it planned to open an office in Singapore and offer services there. A search of LinkedIn on Tuesday found no Drive.ai employees in Singapore, and a business database in Singapore showed no entity named "Drive.ai."

Drive.ai began looking for potential buyers earlier this year and found that Apple, which has about 5,000 employees working on its secretive self-driving car project called Project Titan, seemed interested, according to industry news site The Information.

Apple has never publicly said whether it is trying to build an entire car or the equipment that goes into making a car self-driving, such as sensors, computer systems or software. But last year's rehiring of Doug Field, a Tesla engineer who had worked on computer hardware at Apple, suggested to observers that the company wants to develop cars, not just the components that control them.

Earlier this year, Apple laid off 190 employees as part of a reorganization under new leadership - mostly hardware and software engineers, according to a filing with a state agency.

But lately, Apple appears to have stepped up its self-driving car hiring efforts. Job listings at Apple with the keyword "autonomous" have increased from 26 at the beginning of the year to 35 in June, said James Mattone, deputy editor at data startup Thinknum, which uses job listings to spot hiring trends.

Enthusiasm for self-driving cars has only intensified in recent years among investors, politicians and the public. The death of a pedestrian in Arizona last year by a self-driving Uber sapped public confidence, and executives have made bold predictions about the ability of cars to fully drive themselves. But well-funded companies such as Cruise, Waymo and Tesla are pressing ahead with their plans to launch fleets of self-driving cars.