Toyota’s Woven Planet acquires Renovo for Autonomous OS

Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet Holdings has made its third acquisition in under 12 months. This time, the automotive operating system developer Renovo Motors.

Famous for releasing a video of a self-driving, doughnut-performing DeLorean, which it had developed with Stanford University in 2015, Renovo will remain in its Silicon Valley base but be integrated into Woven Planet’s operation.

Other acquisitions Woven Planet has made in 2021 include mapping start-up Carmera and Lyft’s autonomous driving unit, Level 5.

Delivering a shared vision of mobility

In a recent interview, Renovo co-founder and CEO Chris Heiser, is quoted as saying: “As we’ve built these relationships and tried to understand how do we get to scale — and like, capital S, huge scale — it became increasingly clear to us that we had to find a partner that had the resources and had the backing of an automaker and that had millions and millions of cars to launch on.”

Woven Planet intends to leverage Renovo’s operating system, AWare OS, to run apps associated with automated driving in vehicles, plus mapping technologies and other mobility services that can be delivered to riders and drivers.

Image of Renovo and Woven Planet logos, courtesy of Renovo. 

Image of the doughnut DeLorean, courtesy of Stanford University.