Exclusive: Rivian to acquire ABRP (A Better Route Planner) | Electrek

The deal could close in as a week – or it might have been completed as this goes to print.

Sources tell Electrek that Rivian has been in talks to acquire the world’s most popular EV route planning service, Sweden-based A Better Route Planner, or ABRP for short. Financial details weren’t disclosed, but ABRP is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iternio, which lists a small employee count of under 10 people and 8 people on LinkedIn.

Iternio was founded in 2018 by CEO Bo Lincoln and has two pieces – a consumer-facing entity called ABRP and a backend that other entities plug into to provide routing data. Of course, ABRP plugs into Iternio’s APIs.

Getting into the weeds a bit more from their jobs site:

We’re also told that Rivian has no plans to shut down either the front-end service for other EV owners who still want to use the service for their non-Rivian EVs nor the back end service for other carmakers and services.

In fact, with Rivian’s help and resources, the service is likely to get much better. Rivian will have direct access to vehicle data that will benefit folks with other manufacturer’s cars. It also has direct access to its own charging stations which can provide valuable data.

Similarly, Plugshare charging station aggregator was acquired by the EVgo charging network in 2021 but still operates in a charging network/manufacturer agnostic fashion.

Rivian currently works with Mapbox for its mapping engine, and that engine wouldn’t be supplanted but instead integrated with ABRP data.

We reached out to ABRP CEO Bo Lincoln for confirm/deny/comment who referred us to Rivian. Rivian sent us to their Europe-based head of corporate affairs, who couldn’t comment.

Electrek’s Take

The acquisition makes sense. Rivian could roll their own ABRP for their app and on-screen route guidance and probably was in the process of doing so. But as it builds out its adventure network of charging stations and plans to double vehicle fleet yearly, it probably made sense to go buy a much more mature product made by a small number of employees.

In the bigger picture, ABRP could help Rivian develop its own internal rich mapping system that it could also use as a marketing tool to woo other EV owners.

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