Mobileye's founder-CEO Shashua steps aside as the company pivots to running its own robotaxis

Amnon Shashua, who founded Mobileye in 1999 and led it through nearly three decades, an Intel acquisition and a 2022 re-listing, will step down as CEO once a successor is named, taking the chairman role and staying on as director. The timing is the story: Mobileye is repositioning from a Tier-1 ADAS chip-and-software supplier into an operator of its own robotaxi service — with Volkswagen's MOIA, targeting at least one US city in 2027 with a 100–200 vehicle fleet — and restructuring its Moovit division away from B2B (Calcalist reports ~30% of Moovit's workforce cut). The company also guided Q3 revenue softer, and the stock fell.

Why it matters

A founder-CEO departure paired with a business-model pivot is a double signal, and the market read it cautiously. Selling chips to automakers and running a passenger robotaxi service are different companies with different risk, capital intensity and competitors — the move puts Mobileye into direct-operator territory against Waymo and Tesla's robotaxi rollout rather than supplying the industry beneath them. It sharpens the plan behind Mobileye's 2027 robotaxi target, but at the cost of the supplier-model predictability investors had priced, and it hands the execution to a not-yet-named CEO amid the sector's regulatory scrutiny.

What to watch

Who succeeds Shashua and from where, whether the VW MOIA 2027 launch holds its scope, and how much the Moovit restructuring costs versus what the robotaxi pivot brings in.