A few words from…
Kobi Marenko, CEO of Arbe
Arbe is my 4th startup in which I’m co-founder and CEO.
Tell us about your company
Arbe started five years ago, almost in the same streets as we are sitting now.
We are today around 70 people. Raised till now $55 million in our last round – series B.
What major mobility challenge are you solving?
The ability to see the environment in any weather any lighting condition and up to 300 meters.
This is the main challenge for next generation cars and this the challenge that we are solving. You need to have a very large amount of transmitters and receivers that will really physically have the abilities to detect the obstacles on the environment.
But the main challenge is a processing problem. Imagine: a radar has 30Gb per frame. In order to have a really good understanding of the environment, you need 30 frames per second, it means 1Tb of data.
How?
We are actually the first company introducing an ultra resolution imaging radar and especially the ultrahigh resolution processor. There is no other company in the world that is able to process this in amount of data and generate this high definition radar picture.
Money time
A basic radar based on our chips can be priced at $100 in a mass production. The high-end solution goes up to $150. And it depends on the amount of radars that you want to put on a single vehicle.
So there is a configuration just for safety that can detect a child jumping to the road, bicycles merging into your lane. And for that you need a front looking radar that can detect those obstacles. If you want to move to a level 3, you might need also a radar on the back. And if you want to move higher to a level 4 you need to put 4 radars around the car.
How do you see the transition to autonomous vehicles ?
It’s not something that will happen in one day, you will wake up in the morning and around you there will be an autonomous robotaxi, that will pick you up.
We see it as something that is evolving. First of all, the cars will be able to drive themselves fully autonomously on their highway, bus lanes, detect the obstacles. Then these cars will be able also to get into the environnement of the city and drive there fully safe.
How do you feel about the deal of Moovit & Intel? Are you the next one?
When you are starting a company, you don’t think of who is your buyer. Especially five years ago, Intel wasn’t around mobility.
We believe that the move of Moovit is a very good step for Intel, Mobileye towards building a real service of robotaxi.
Regarding us, we are now focusing on putting our sensors in every car in order to make the world safer and to make the driving easier
Wow, that’s quite a mission! One last word?
We are hopping for automotive industry to have a V shape and not something like this in the next few months.
