Japan's Toyota Motor Corp is seeking more investments in Israeli robotics and vehicle technologies after its venture arm led a $14 million investment in Intuition Robotics in July. The startup, which makes robots for the elderly, was the first Israeli investment for Toyota AI Ventures, a new $100 million fund investing in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous mobility and data and cloud computing.
"We will see more involvement of Toyota in the Israeli market in the future," said Jim Adler, managing director of California-based Toyota AI Ventures, which is part of the $1 billion Toyota Research Institute.
"There's more in the pipeline," he told Reuters during a visit to Israel, adding that technologies dealing with perception and prediction and planning were of particular interest to Toyota. Perception technology enables a self-driving vehicle to understand the world around it while prediction and planning can help a car interpret situations such as whether a child at an intersection might try to cross at a red light.