NI Acquires monoDrive to Accelerate Autonomous Vehicle Development

NI (Nasdaq: NATI) announced it has acquired monoDrive, a leader in ultra-high fidelity simulation software for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle development. The acquisition expands NI’s reach in the ADAS and simulation markets and will enable NI’s transportation customers to accelerate the development, test, and deployment of safer autonomous systems.

The design cycles for ADAS are complex and automotive OEMs and suppliers need systems that streamline the transitions between simulation, lab-based and physical test environments to ultimately create safer vehicles. Today, disparate tools cause siloed processes, time-to-market delays, and lead to higher costs that reduce the pace of innovation and hinder the quality of advanced technologies.

NI will leverage monoDrive’s expertise in signal processing and advanced simulation to help customers accelerate the delivery of ADAS through high fidelity driving environments capable of modeling numerous sensors and thousands of real-time scenarios. This approach combined with NI’s software-connected systems will help transportation customers streamline the transitions between simulation, lab-based and physical testing environments.

In doing so, NI will now enable vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to accelerate the shift to self-driving vehicles.

“We welcome the monoDrive employees to NI and look forward to collectively accelerating our growth ambitions for our transportation business,” said Chad Chesney, NI Vice President and General Manager of the transportation business unit. “The combination of monoDrive’s advanced software and NI’s strong position in ADAS will enable smooth transitions across our customer’s software validation workflows. This in turn delivers greater test efficiency, coverage and more realistic testing scenarios to help automotive manufacturers get safe and reliable autonomous vehicles on the road faster.”

“The monoDrive team is excited to join NI’s transportation business unit and accelerate the deployment of our high-fidelity simulation products,” said Celite Milbrandt, CEO of monoDrive. “Over the past five years, monoDrive has achieved a leadership position in vehicle simulation. We believe the combination of NI and monoDrive products will help our customers accelerate their goal of deploying safer vehicles.”

In conjunction with this acquisition, NI also announced a strategic collaboration with Ansys, the global leader in engineering simulation.

Ansys’ industry-leading simulation solution enables sensor vendors to simulate the fundamental physics of their radars, LiDARs, and cameras from design through manufacturing. Together, NI and Ansys will help solve the complex challenge of recreating real-world simulation to validate sensors and inject data into software and hardware under test in real-time. This shared focus will provide customers with critical insights into how products will perform in market by bridging the worlds of simulated and physical test with more precise outcomes.

“Ansys is committed to building world-class products in an open-ecosystem.

Collaborating with NI complements this strategy, positioning Ansys to provide more comprehensive solutions to our customers’ engineering challenges,” said Matt Zack, VP Corporate Development and Global Partnerships at Ansys. “Combining Ansys’ physics-based sensor simulation solutions with NI’s driving simulation and testing infrastructure will enable mutual customers to more quickly develop safer ADAS technology.”

About NI

At NI, we bring together the people, ideas and technology so forward thinkers and creative problem solvers can take on humanity’s biggest challenges. From data and automation to research and validation, we provide the tailored, software-connected systems engineers and enterprises need to Engineer AmbitiouslyT every day.

About Ansys

If you’ve ever seen a rocket launch, flown on an airplane, driven a car, used a computer, touched a mobile device, crossed a bridge or put on wearable technology, chances are you’ve used a product where Ansys software played a critical role in its creation. Ansys is the global leader in engineering simulation. Through our strategy of Pervasive Engineering Simulation, we help the world’s most innovative companies deliver radically better products to their customers. By offering the best and broadest portfolio of engineering simulation software, we help them solve the most complex design challenges and create products limited only by imagination.

Founded in 1970, Ansys is headquartered south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Visit www.ansys.com for more information.

About monoDrive

The company’s High Fidelity Simulator allows vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers to use simulators to drive vehicles millions of miles in virtual worlds. In contrast to human drivers testing autonomous vehicles, which is both expensive and subject to human error, the monoDrive Simulator helps vehicle manufacturers identify edge cases, which are hard to predict and can have dire consequences. Founded in 2016 by Celite Milbrandt, monoDrive is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Visit https://www.monodrive.io for more information.