Advancing Mobility for Everyone and Everything
For Magna International, the recent acquisition of MIT spinoff Optimus Ride is another step on the steady march towards fulfilling the vision of the mobility technology company with a keen focus on electrification and autonomy: to advance mobility for everyone and everything while shaping a better future for all.
Thanks to an alignment of synergies and mutual respect, it took little time to close a deal that saw Magna acquire the MIT-born self-driving technology startup’s impressive collection of talent and intellectual property, simultaneously cementing a foothold in the Boston innovation ecosystem. The groundwork that would result in a smooth, rapid transition started in 2017, when MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) coordinated a targeted introduction between Magna and MIT Professor Sertac Karaman, a co-founder of Optimus.
“As a large organization it is important to have insight and a pipeline to university research and startup ecosystems,” says Magna’s Director of R&D Jim Quesenberry. “We weren’t sure where the relationship with Sertac would go, but we knew we’d made an important contact. Thanks to ILP we had a mechanism in place for opening the door to speak with a renowned expert in the field of autonomous driving, and a way to keep that door ajar.”
Karaman’s notion of building autonomy in a mindful way, and his consideration of the opportunities and challenges facing the industry, resonated with Magna.
At the initial meeting, Karaman presented his research and his vision for a transportation revolution powered by safe, sustainable, and equitable mobility solutions. At a point in time when people were predicting that the urban landscape would be dominated by autonomous vehicles in a few short years, Karaman offered a more nuanced view.
“I told Magna that full autonomy is a difficult problem; no one is going to drive autonomously from Harvard Square to Times Square in a snowstorm anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t good markets and verticals to build valuable autonomy products—and that’s what I was focused on, not only in my research, but with Optimus Ride.”
Karaman’s notion of building autonomy in a mindful way, and his consideration of the opportunities and challenges facing the industry, resonated with Magna. Though there were no formal engagements between the two organizations for some time, Magna made a point of keeping tabs on Karaman’s work and the trajectory of Optimus Ride. When Optimus presented at the 2017 MIT Startup Showcase in Silicon Valley, Magna was there.
“News and information only flows if you have that prior engagement, which again, highlights the importance of ILP and MIT Startup Exchange in that it creates a conduit for information to flow so that when an opportunity presents itself, if the objectives are aligned and the timing is right, you know who to reach out to,” says Quesenberry.
Over time, Magna and Optimus developed a relationship that included working on several small projects together, illuminating a mutual alignment around vision, culture, and technology. This allowed both leadership teams to move quickly when necessary. “I think part of the magic of ILP is its ability to connect people who speak the same language, so to speak. Magna’s vision and leadership team are exciting, and I think they are well placed in the automotive industry to drive the technology forward at scale,” says Karaman.
Optimus was led by a team of MIT-based experts boasting over 30 years of interdisciplinary university research in self-driving technologies, electric vehicles, and Mobility-on-Demand Systems, not to mention a decade of industrial and entrepreneurial experience that combined manufacturing robots, urban design, and shared vehicle fleet management. “We knew Optimus was stacked with talent and had developed impressive intellectual properties, but perhaps the greatest delight to me was the process side, things like continuous integration and dev-ops,” says Jim Farell, Magna’s VP of Engineering for North America and Asia. “It’s not just what they were doing, but how they were doing it that impressed us.”
Magna is now working to integrate the Optimus team and technology into its plans, leveraging everything the startup has built and the talent at its disposal to accelerate its goal of creating a better world of mobility, responsibly.