June 29, 2020: Amazon has signed an agreement to buy the 6-year-old startup Zoox. This is one of the largest acquisitions in recent days from Amazon. Zoox is a company founded in 2014. The company produces self-driven cars, valued at $3.2B in 2018. However, the pandemic has made the company to layoff 10% of its workforce. More than 100 employees were laid-off in the last three months.

Zoox will run as a stand-alone business under Amazon and, they would keep the CEO, Co-Founder, CTO, to function the same. “Zoox is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous ride-hailing experience,” said Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO.

The company focuses only on providing the autonomous cars on the ground with the advancement in the human and AI interface. The company also said the Amazon takeover will help them to focus more on their mission and provide safe and environmentally friendly cars shortly. Experts say Amazon can save up to $20B in its delivery network by working with Zoox to deliver a more efficient delivery network.

The company just settled a lawsuit with Tesla as it admitted some of the employees they hired from Tesla had some documents while joining. Tesla also filed complaints on the former employees and current employees of Zoox. Elon Musk tweeted Amazon CEO as copy[cat] after the news announced of the its purchase.