Porsche SE has made an investment in Aurora Labs of Tel Aviv, Israel, for $US2.5m.
The automaker said its stake was in "the low single digit percentage area".
Founded in 2016, Aurora Labs specialises in the validation and verification of software in the field of automotive and connected devices.
Porsche said the is especially suitable for efficient and safe software updates via mobile interface, so called over the air (OTA) updates. This represents a fast growing market since the amount of software related applications as well as the requirement for instant update ability in cars will further increase in the coming years.
Compared to products currently available, Aurora Labs' machine learning based technology is able to detect and predict software errors and perform system updates to the entire car with zero downtime. If an updated software is faulty, the technology can be used to immediately restore the previous software version. This comes along with a reduction of time necessary for updates by as much as 90%, leading to a substantial decline in cost for memory, data and energy consumption. The capability of the technology has already been confirmed in several proof of concept projects and serial implementation is due within two years.
Lutz Meschke, in charge of Porsche SE investment management, said: "In the future software will be the major differentiating factor in cars and efficient software updates will play an increasingly important role. Through our investment in Aurora Labs we add a company to our portfolio in a market with strong growth potential." Porsche SE expects such services to become increasingly relevant for automotive manufacturers.
Porsche SE already has holdings in two 3D printing specialists Markforged and Seurat Technologies, as well as AEVA, a specialist in laser based object recognition, Lidar.
