Mobileye Global (NASDAQ: MBLY)

February 16 2023

Mobileye Global (NASDAQ: MBLY), a provider of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies, is a recent addition to our Battle Road IPO Review. Founded in 1999 by Amnon Shashua, a Hebrew University professor and researcher, the company first deployed its solutions on vehicles in 2007.  Today, Mobileye is headquartered in Jerusalem, Israel, where it is still led by Shashua, who acts as the company’s CEO, President, and Director.

Mobileye first debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on August 1^st, 2014.  The company continued trading on the exchange until March 2017, when it was purchased by Intel for $15.3 billion.  At the time, Mobileye’s market cap was roughly $10.5 billion. Intel’s thinking at the time, was that Mobileye’s ADAS offerings, essentially software embedded on a computer chip, would complement Intel’s core chip offerings. Perhaps realizing the lack of synergy with its core business, Intel elected to carve out the business, while retaining voting rights. Thus, Mobileye returned to trading desks on October 26^th, 2022 as a spinoff of Intel.  This late-October IPO entailed the sale of 47.2 million Class A common stock shares, inclusive of the underwriters’ 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 6.2 million shares, with all shares coming from the company.  Mobileye also sold 4.8 million Class A common stock shares to General Atlantic in a private placement for gross proceeds of $100 million.  In total, with a 2022 IPO share price of $21, Mobileye generated net cash of roughly $1 billion from the IPO and private placement.  When added to the company’s pre-IPO cash balance of $774 million, Mobileye possessed $1.8 billion in cash with no debt immediately after the offering.

Mobileye is a pioneer in the production of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies and solutions.  Mobileye’s offerings are based on its expansive purpose-built software and hardware technologies that are made to supply the necessary functions to enhance ADAS and autonomous driving.  Further, these technologies can already be leveraged in vehicles to provide mission-critical activities that make roads and vehicles safer, and can be delivered at the edge or in the cloud.

Mobileye projects that the current total addressable market for its ADAS solutions is $16 billion, and the company predicts that its total addressable market will rise to $480 billion by the end of 2030, inclusive of the ADAS segment as well as the autonomous vehicle market.  Mobileye has carved out a solid share of this current market, as the company generated 2020 revenue of $967 million with a net loss of $196 million.  In 2021, Mobileye’s revenue jumped 43 percent to $1.4 billion, and the company’s net loss shrunk to $75 million.  Mobileye notes that essentially all of its revenue currently comes from its commercially deployed ADAS products.