On Tuesday, Lyft offered a glimpse of its brand-new self-driving car. It’s a Ford Fusion hybrid sedan with technology designed and built by the ride-hailing company’s in-house team of autonomous vehicle engineers. Lyft also announced the acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, a London-based augmented reality startup that uses computer vision to process street-level imagery.

Lyft has 300 engineers working on self-driving cars

The acquisition, first reported by TechCrunch, is a first for Lyft’s “Level 5” self-driving division. The company announced that it would start building its own autonomous driving technology in July 2017. It was a bold move for a company that, at the time, had been content to simply partner with more experienced automakers and tech firms that had huge head starts in designing the complex technology that powers self-driving cars. Today, Lyft has 300 engineers and technicians housed in its Level 5 headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and another office in Munich, Germany.

Blue Vision was founded in 2016 by graduates from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, and it only came out of stealth last March. According to Tech Crunch, Blue Vision was acquired by Lyft for “around $72 million with $30 million on top of that based on hitting certain milestones.” The company’s 40-person team will become an anchor for Lyft’s self-driving operations in the UK, Vincent said. (The ride-hail company currently only operates in North America, but it’s reportedly considering expanding into European markets in the near future.)

The company develops “collaborative AR experiences” using technology as simple as a smartphone camera. In a Medium post, Luc Vincent, the company’s lead engineer, said the company’s technology is “cutting-edge” because it can crowdsource highly detailed 3D maps of entire cities using a smartphone or other camera mounted on the dashboard of a car. “These maps allow a car to understand exactly where it is, what’s around it, and what to do next, with centimeter-level accuracy,” he said. (Vincent knows a thing or two about maps; he helped pioneer Street View for Google Maps.)

“This is truly amazing tech.”

This will become key as Lyft seeks to build high-res maps that help its self-driving cars navigate complex environments. Lyft can combine Blue Vision’s camera-based maps with its own geometric maps built using LIDAR sensors mounted to the roofs of its vehicles. “Blue Vision Labs is the first company able to build city-scale 3D maps from cell phone acquired imagery,” Vincent added. “This is truly amazing tech.”

Lyft’s self-driving cars are being tested on public roads in California, but the testing is still in its nascent stages. (The company did not file a disengagement report with the state’s DMV in 2017, indicating it hadn’t racked up any significant mileage at that point.) Lyft is also operating a small fleet of self-driving cars in Las Vegas in partnership with Aptiv, the self-driving offshoot of global auto parts supplier Delphi. In August, the companies said they had completed 5,000 paid trips in their autonomous BMW sedans.

The self-driving hardware and software of the Las Vegas fleet are developed by Aptiv, but these new vehicles are all Lyft. As Uber slims down and scales back its self-driving program in the wake of a fatal crash in Arizona earlier this year, Lyft is plowing ahead with its own project. The company, which is aiming to go public in early 2019 with a reported value of $15.1 billion, also plans to double the size of its self-driving team within the next 18 months, according to Vincent. “We’ve got a big year ahead of us,” he said.