dSPACE Acquires understand.ai in Effort to Strengthen AI Expertise

dSPACE, the leading provider of solutions for the development of networked, autonomous, and electrically powered vehicles, acquires the start-up company understand.ai. Under the umbrella of the dSPACE group companies, understand.ai will invest in the core tasks, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and cloud-based tools, further develop its existing products as an integral part of the dSPACE product range and use the dSPACE global sales network to market its products and services.

“understand.ai is an AI technology leader with a focus on automated data analysis, data annotation and extraction of simulation scenarios for autonomous vehicles. With these key technologies, we are strategically enhancing the dSPACE portfolio to offer our customers a unique, integrated development and test solution for autonomous driving,” says Martin Goetzeler, CEO of dSPACE.

“We see dSPACE as the ideal partner for growth as understand.ai takes its next development step. Testing is the bottleneck in the development of autonomous driving, and dSPACE, as a leading development partner of the automotive industry, will give us a strong momentum with its expertise and network,” explains Marc Mengler, co-founder and CEO of understand.ai.

“Marc Mengler and I are looking forward to working with dSPACE to improve local customer service, accelerate our international growth, and further expand our global leadership position in solutions for providing training and validation data,” adds Philip Kessler, co-founder and CTO of understand.ai.

understand.ai uses self-learning algorithms to process training and validation data. The underlying key technology is also based on artificial intelligence and ensures efficient data analysis as well as precise data annotation, which helps ensure quality training data for AI-based driving algorithms, according to the company. understand.ai develops AI- and web-based tools for this area of application. The underlying know-how is also used to extract simulation scenarios from sensor data.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.