A Hebrew University professor bet that one cheap camera could do the work of radar. Amnon Shashua's company, Mobileye, built a chip called EyeQ that read lanes, cars and people from a windshield camera and warned the driver in time to stop. By 2014 automakers had put it in millions of cars. When Mobileye went public that summer, investors valued it at about $5.3 billion.

A Professor and a Windshield

Shashua founded Mobileye in Jerusalem in 1999 with businessman Ziv Aviram. The industry wanted radar and lasers to spot obstacles. Shashua argued that computer vision alone could do it, if the software was good enough and the chip was cheap enough. Mobileye sold its EyeQ chips and software to the suppliers that build parts for carmakers. Its systems warned of lane drift, measured the distance to the car ahead, and later hit the brakes.

Sold Once, Listed Twice

Mobileye priced at $25 a share on July 31, 2014, above its raised range, and closed its first day on the New York Stock Exchange at $37, up 48 percent. In 2017 Intel bought the company for $15.3 billion. Five years later Intel took Mobileye public again, pricing a new offering at $21 a share in October 2022. It trades on Nasdaq under its old symbol, MBLY, with Intel still the majority owner.

Cover: There Was Perhaps a First Vision Attempted in the Flower, plate 2 of 8 from "Les Origines", Odilon Redon. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an eye opening in a flower (machine vision).