Automotive technology company Aptiv announced a deal to acquire software company Wind River from private equity firm TPG Capital for $4.3 billion, as part of a bid to strengthen its position in the connected car market and expand into new verticals.
Wind River’s portfolio is anchored by Wind River Studio, a cloud-native platform for edge-to-cloud use cases. The company has more than 1,700 global customers and its intelligent edge software is now deployed on more than 2 billion devices worldwide.
It posted revenue of approximately $400 million in 2021, a slideshow for investors showed. Around 45% of that revenue came from the aerospace and defense industry, with 30% from the industrial and medical sectors, 15% from telecom and 10% from automotive. On a call with investors, Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark said Aptiv expects Wind River’s addressable market will grow from $50 billion in 2021 to $80 billion in 2026.
RELATED: Wind River partners with Dell EMC for 5G vRAN infrastructure use cases
“Wind River has strong product offerings across multiple high-growth mission critical industries and has strong relationships with some of the most innovative and technology forward companies in their respective sectors,” he noted. By combining Wind River’s capabilities with Aptiv’s global scale and complementary technologies, Clark said “we can accelerate the digital transformation of mission critical industries and edge devices.
The acquisition is expected to close in mid-2022. Once it wraps, Aptiv said it plans to combine Wind River Studio with its own Smart Vehicle Architecture (SVA) platform to boost its position in the automotive software market.
“Wind River’s Studio cloud native platform will allow for the development, deployment, operation and servicing of the vehicle software stack, shortening the development cycles and speeding time to market for new upgrades and enhancements,” Clark explained.
Beyond that, Wind River will operate as a stand-alone business within Aptiv’s Advanced Safety & User Experience (AS&UX) unit. It will continue to be led by Wind River CEO Kevin Dallas.