Electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian has acquired British startup Third Dimension. Founded by professionals from the gaming and autonomous driving industries, the company uses artificial intelligence to transform images and videos into realistic 3D worlds.

Rivian is not intended to enter the gaming industry, but it hopes to utilize the technology of Third Dimension to transform real-world data and build a 3D world, thereby accelerating the development of its advanced driver assistance functions as well as the robot taxi self-driving system supplied for Uber.

Transaction terms have not been disclosed. Third Dimension has a total of 15 employees, most of whom are located in the UK. They will be integrated into the autonomous driving team led by James Philbin and the AI team at Rivian. In an exclusive interview, Philbin stated that this acquisition also gives Rivian the opportunity to expand its AI center located in London.

Third Dimension was founded in 2024 by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokolski. The company received a $7 million seed round of financing from venture capital firms such as Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital, and Solari Capital. Although the technology was initially developed to accelerate video game development, the founders saw other potential applications, including in national defense and autonomous vehicles.

Today, under the banner of Rivian, they will focus on autonomous driving.

“The team is very happy to be able to focus on one issue,” Kart told TechCrunch in an interview. “I think it’s very difficult for a small company to have to serve so many different stakeholders at the same time, so we are thrilled to be able to solve such a large-scale problem, where our technology can truly make a difference.”

Simulation is an important tool for autonomous vehicle developers; they use it to train and validate autonomous driving systems. Historically, these simulators were typically built on rendering or video game engines and often relied on synthetic data. Kart indicates that these virtual environments may appear similar to the real world, but there is still a gap between the two. The common approach is to feed more and more data into the simulators in the hope of narrowing this quality gap.

The technology of Third Dimension uses AI to match the physical world. When combined with the vast amount of data from Rivian, it could potentially become a valuable simulator.

Tens of thousands of R1S pickups, R1S SUV, delivery vans, and R2 SUV on the roads collect driving data – essentially any vehicle whose owner has enabled the external camera sharing feature. Rivian uses this aggregated and anonymized data to build driving training models. Philbin states that Rivian uploads over 400,000 data records per day from its customer fleet.

Philbin said that the technology of Third Dimension will enable Rivian to simulate complex driving conditions without having to wait for rare extreme situations in the real world to occur.

This article is still being updated, and more content will be added later.