A company now
owned by Uber last year quietly bought a small firm specializing in sensor
technology used in autonomous vehicles, giving the ride services company a
patent in the technology and possibly a defense against a trade secrets theft
lawsuit filed against it by rival Alphabet Inc.
The chief
executive of little-known Tyto Lidar LLC said in a May 2016 post on LinkedIn
that the company had been sold, at the same time as he and three other
executives joined Otto, according to their profiles on the online business
network. Official U.S. patent data shows Otto acquired Tyto technology at the
same time.
Otto, a
self-driving truck startup founded by former Alphabet employees, was bought by
Uber in August.
The
unpublicized acquisition may become a factor in the high-stakes legal fight
between Uber and Alphabet, the parent of Google, as the two Silicon Valley
companies aggressively develop self-driving technology, widely seen as the
future of private road transport in the United States.
Equally, it
may end up being a footnote in the complex litigation, which could take years
to unfold.
Alphabet's
autonomous car unit Waymo sued Uber and Otto last week, alleging that former
employee Anthony Levandowski, who left Waymo to set up Otto, downloaded and
stole more than 14,000 confidential files, including details on light detection
and ranging sensor technology, known as Lidar, a crucial element in most
self-driving car systems.
It claimed
that without those Waymo designs, Uber could not have developed its technology
as fast as it says.
An Uber
spokesperson declined to comment on Tyto, citing the pending litigation, but
called Waymo's lawsuit "a baseless attempt to slow down a
competitor." Waymo declined to comment on Tyto.
'STRIKING
RESEMBLANCE'
In its
lawsuit, Waymo said that by mid-2016, Uber was "more than five years
behind in the race to develop vehicle automation technology suitable for the
mass market," yet it built a Lidar system comparable to Waymo's "in
only nine months".
However, the
acquisition of Tyto means that at least two executives with long experience in
Lidar – one as early as 2009, according to his LinkedIn profile - transferred
to Otto and then Uber. Both had previously worked at Velodyne, another Silicon
Valley Lidar pioneer, according to LinkedIn.
Tyto also came
to Otto with a patent for a Lidar scanner that was filed in 2013 and has since
been reassigned to Uber, according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
website.
Eric Goldman,
an intellectual property (IP) law professor at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara
University School of Law, said the Tyto acquisition and its patent "could
help rebut" Waymo's suggestion that Uber scaled up too quickly to have its
own Lidar technology.
Trade secret
plaintiffs commonly make circumstantial cases, such as Waymo implying that Uber
could not have developed its own technology as fast as it purported to do,
Goldman said.
"That
prong of their arguments could be rebutted," Goldman said.
He cautioned,
however, that Tyto's expertise and patent "may be irrelevant" if
Waymo can prove its central allegation: that Levandowski downloaded
confidential trade secrets before leaving the company to form Otto - and that
Uber exploited this stolen information to design a Lidar circuit board with a "striking
resemblance" to Waymo's.
In an
interview with Forbes in October that was published on Tuesday, Levandowski
said Uber did not steal trade secrets from Google. "We did not steal any
Google IP," he told the magazine.
Waymo says its
patented Lidar technology is among its most valuable assets because it had
successfully managed to reduce the price of the sensor by 90 percent.
All Lidar
makers are seeking to reduce cost and size. Promotional material for Tyto from
a 2015 trade conference said Tyto's technology "enables lower cost,
lighter weight and smaller size Lidar sensors."
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