Amnon Shashua

Amnon Shashua (born 26 May 1960) is the Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur who solved a problem the automotive industry had assumed required expensive radar and laser arrays: getting a car to recognize danger from a single ordinary camera. He co-founded Mobileye in 1999 to commercialize that insight, built it into the chip that now rides inside more than 200 million vehicles worldwide, and sold it to Intel in 2017 for $15.3 billion, still the largest acquisition of an Israeli technology company on record. He remains Mobileye’s president and CEO, holds the Sachs Chair in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has separately built OrCam, a wearable device that reads text aloud to the blind.

Who he is

Shashua was born in Ramat Gan to a family of Iraqi Jewish origin, part of the roughly 130,000 Jews who left or fled Iraq for Israel in the mass exodus of 1950 and 1951 after millennia of Jewish presence in Mesopotamia turned hostile following Israel’s founding. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University in 1985, a master’s in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1989, and a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1993, followed by postdoctoral work under Tomaso Poggio at MIT’s Center for Biological and Computational Learning. He returned to Israel to teach, and has held the Sachs Chair in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2007, publishing more than 160 academic papers and holding over 200 patents in computer vision and machine learning.

What he built

The problem Shashua set out to solve was expensive. Through the 1990s, the automotive safety industry assumed that any system meant to warn a driver of an imminent collision needed radar, laser rangefinders (lidar), or both, hardware that was bulky and costly to put in a mass-market car. Shashua’s research bet was that a single low-cost camera, paired with the right computer vision algorithms, could extract the same depth and motion information a human eye and brain extract when judging distance and closing speed, without a dedicated distance sensor at all. In 1999 he co-founded Mobileye with businessman Ziv Aviram to build that bet into a product: a camera and a purpose-built chip, later branded EyeQ, that could run collision-warning, lane-departure, and pedestrian-detection algorithms in real time inside a car’s dashboard. The first-generation EyeQ chip reached production vehicles in 2004. It was a hard problem precisely because a single 2D image contains no direct distance measurement: the system has to infer range, trajectory, and threat from pixels alone, fast enough and reliably enough to trust with a human life, a task closer to teaching a machine to see than to building a sensor.

Where and when it scaled

Mobileye went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 6 August 2014, raising $890 million in what remains the largest US IPO by an Israeli company, at an opening valuation of $5.3 billion. Three years later, on 13 March 2017, Intel announced it would acquire Mobileye outright for $63.54 a share in cash, a deal worth approximately $15.3 billion in equity value, the largest acquisition of an Israeli tech company ever recorded, done to fuse Mobileye’s computer vision with Intel’s computing hardware for the emerging self-driving car market. Mobileye continued operating from Jerusalem as an Intel subsidiary, then returned to public markets a second time in 2022 on the Nasdaq under ticker MBLY, with Intel retaining a majority stake. By the end of 2024 Mobileye’s chips had been designed into vehicles from more than 30 automakers across over 800 models, with a cumulative total exceeding 200 million vehicles on the road carrying its technology, a scale few Israeli-founded companies have reached in any sector.

Why this came out of Israel

Shashua’s path fits a pattern common among Israeli deep-tech founders: a research scientist trained at an elite lab (MIT, in his case) who returned home to a country whose universities, national R&D culture, and famously blunt, informal engineering style (what Israelis call chutzpah) reward taking a contrarian technical bet rather than following the industry consensus. Betting that a camera alone could out-perform radar and lidar was, at the time, a minority position in automotive engineering; Shashua ran the research anyway and built a company small and fast enough to prove it before larger, better-funded competitors committed to sensor fusion. That combination, elite research training plus a compact, low-bureaucracy home base willing to fund a long, capital-intensive bet on a single scientist’s thesis, has repeated across Israel’s tech sector and is part of why the country produces a disproportionate share of the world’s automotive and defense-adjacent deep tech relative to its population of under ten million.

Other ventures, and the objection that doesn’t hold

Skeptics point out that not every Shashua venture has matched Mobileye’s scale. In 2010 he co-founded OrCam Technologies, which built a small camera-and-earpiece device, OrCam MyEye, that reads printed text aloud and recognizes faces for blind and visually impaired users; it was named a TIME Best Invention in 2019, a proven win. He also founded the digital bank One Zero in 2019 and co-founded the humanoid robotics company Mentee Robotics in 2021, both still early-stage bets whose outcomes are not yet settled. That gap is simply the base rate for serial deep-tech founders, not a mark against him: Mobileye and OrCam have already shipped at world scale and collected independent validation, a $15.3 billion acquisition and a TIME invention award, while the newer ventures are still running their course. In 2023 Israel’s Ministry of Education awarded Shashua the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the country’s highest civilian honor, for his contributions to Israeli tech, automotive safety, and applied AI; in 2026 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering.