Electric vehicles (EVs) are key to a more sustainable future. In 2020, we saw a rapid acceleration in uptake, with sales of EVs rising by 43%. COP26 earlier this month has similarly reinforced the importance of net-zero and sustainable initiatives, which we expect to lead to further market growth.
Yet, while EVs are predicted to represent 48% of all new cars sold in 2030, for this to come to fruition, an unbundling is required in the software and hardware which makes up the vehicle.
“We believe that consumers will buy cars on the strength of their software,” Mina Samaan, VC Investor at MMC Ventures, said in a recent blog.
To keep up with Tesla, many OEMs need to completely change their employee knowledge-base to meet the need for the electric powertrain and software-first principles. But time is not on their side — consumer demand is driving ambitious production targets, making it highly challenging for them to compete.
“This why we led a $11 million or R172 million round into Eatron, alongside our friends at Aster Capital and VinFast,” Samaan wrote.
U.K.-based Eatron, which makes this “intelligent automotive software”, has a long-standing collaboration in different projects with Vinfast to explore and accelerate deployment of the company’s software platform into Vinfast’s rapidly expanding range of electric cars.
Eatron entered into a similar strategic partnership with the Hirschvogel Group from Germany in the summer of 2020 when Hirschvogel also invested $1.5 million+.
Eatron, with a world-class R&D centre in Istanbul, has developed a unique software platform – spanning from the edge to the cloud – which is driving significant innovation in the continuous optimization of performance, efficiency and safety of software-defined electric vehicles.
Eatron’s innovative technology enables OEMs and Tier-1s to de-couple complex embedded automotive software from the underlying electronic hardware through abstraction and rapidly deploy such software for serial production. The company already has major programme wins with OEMs which are going into production from Q1 2022.
“Mobility and Automotive in particular, is in the middle of a dramatic transformation and as part of this change needs to become a software-driven industry. An intelligent automotive software platform, embedded at the edge and connected to the cloud, will play a critical role in this transformation,” Dr Umut Genc, co-founder and CEO at Eatron, said.
“For Eatron, this is a platform and data play – where we make a big difference with a unique synthesis of functional safety, machine learning, advanced controls, connectivity and cloud analytics for production grade customisable automotive software components. This helps OEMs and Tier-1s to develop connected intelligent software-defined electric vehicles faster, better, and hence enables them to stay ahead of their competition”.
Eatron’s platform currently offers highly differentiated software applications for battery management (BMS), intelligent motion control, and advanced driver assistance (ADAS) for serial production. Eatron’s unique modular platform approach increases supplier choice for OEMs and significantly reduces cost, risks and time to market.
Each Eatron software application running on the edge is powered by AI and designed to have a cloud counterpart with analytics, offering OTA updates and continuous software improvements to achieve superior performance and reliability over the lifetime of the vehicles.
Part of the Series-A funding will be used to expand the platform with additional partnerships for third-party software modules and semiconductor & hardware component suppliers.
The company already has a growing list of such partnerships with majors which it plans to announce in due course.
Because of its unique platform approach and highly differentiated technology, Eatron has seen strong demand for its offering with revenues increasing more than 500% during the past 12 months. Eatron is currently running several advanced development programs with leading semiconductor suppliers and Tier-1s and therefore continuously increasing its global network of supported automotive electronics and system suppliers.
The new investment will further accelerate the development and deployment of new embedded and cloud-based intelligent features as well as fuelling an ambitious global growth of Eatron development teams in the UK, Turkey, and China.
As part of its global expansion Eatron will grow its sales teams in Germany, India and USA. This is expected to create more than 50 new jobs globally in the coming year in addition to the 50 jobs it created during the past 12 months.
“Everywhere you look today, all governments across the world are committing to driving incentives for increasing electric vehicles and autonomy on the roads over the next five years,” Samaan said.
“Yet while some automotive OEMs have built and released capabilities, the majority are significantly behind. We have seen many software businesses building interesting algorithmic concepts to support these OEMs, but none have had the expertise to meet the regulatory, security and safety requirements for automotive production.
“Eatron is the exception. Its software has been built from the ground up to be automotive grade and has the potential to drive the battery and autonomy features in hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the coming years.”
