On the morning of February 11, Waymo, a driverless car company owned by Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, has reached a civil lawsuit with US taxi service Uber on charges of stealing Waymo related to driverless technology Trade secrets.
Under the settlement, Uber will pay Waymo 240 million U.S. dollars in cash. In the investigation of the lawsuit, investigators said Uber valued at 72 billion U.S. dollars after it received a 1.25 billion U.S. dollar investment from Softbank last month. The cash payment is equivalent to 0.88% stake in Uber.
The dispute with Waymo dates back to being dismissed by former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, a former Google employee who left in 2016 to start the unmanned truck company Otto, The company was sold to Uber, which then filed a lawsuit against Uber alleging that Lewandowski left more than 14,000 confidential documents containing trade secrets when he left Google.
Lewandowski's finger-stealing data includes a blueprint of the circuit board and information related to a LiDAR system, which is a key component of a driverless vehicle sensor and is also crucial to map technology. Allegedly, Uber did use the company's intellectual property in its lidar technology.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi posted a blog post insisting that Uber did not get Waymo's trade secrets and that 'we do not believe Uber had any use of Waymo in its driverless technology With information. "But Cososshassi said the two companies are working together to ensure that Uber's lidar and software are truly self-developed.
Cososshassi also admitted: 'Uber's acquisition of Otto could and could have been handled differently.'