Good afternoon. Welcome to the first day of IAA. Fantastic to be here. I have the opportunity to share with all of you a partnership that we've been working on for the last three and a half years, and it's just been outstanding to be part of BMW's Neue Klasse launch with our autonomous driving stack. Qualcomm has been in the automotive business for 20 years now, and we have become relevant as a technology company, as a semiconductor supplier, as somebody that does a tremendous amount of software across connectivity, infotainment, and ADAS. We went onto the journey of getting into the ADAS stack business about three and a half years ago, and I'm going to share with you today the journey that we've been on, what we have learned alongside one of our very important partners.
The shared mission that we had as we took on this opportunity to get into the autonomous driving stack was technologies becoming part and parcel of every car. Sensors today, if you look at IAA, this is something that is commonplace. But if you went back five years ago, this concept of will cars be safe, will they drive autonomously, will they reduce collisions? It was a really important aspect that Qualcomm believed in, and we decided this is something that we would take seriously.
Being a new business, apart from being able to build the right kind of technology, acquire the right kind of talent, we also had to partner with the right kind of company. And who better to partner with than an OEM that is known globally for the highest standards of safety, for focusing on their consumers, for being able to stand behind something that is really complicated in today's day and age. The partnership that we built started off in 2021, and consistently over the years we started to build, we started to take assets that we were building alongside BMW with the ultimate goal of having a stack that we would supply into BMW vehicles but also have access to the same technology to scale up to the rest of the ecosystem.
And this part is really important. The stack that we have built will be deployed in 60 countries this year, moving over to 100 countries next year. So if you think about what that means at scale, that's what we are starting to go build.
The companies are obviously very different. Our roots are in semiconductors. We've been doing automotive for a long time. We do a tremendous amount of software, hardware integration, systems engineering, supporting our customers globally. And about a decade or so ago, it became really clear to us that semiconductors in cars needed to not just be automotive quality, but automotive safety quality. And this is something coming from a tech space. What this means is every single aspect of what we build has to be built with safety in mind. And that's the approach that we took. That's the commitment that we made to ourselves and to our customers.
Alongside that, what became very clear is that everything that we would develop, whether it's camera technology, whether it's the operating systems that we use, the traceability that we have to be able to provide, needed to keep in mind that this would need to work globally. It would need to pass regulation. It would need to be something that I would feel comfortable buying for my family and put my family members in. So, the bar for us was really high.
The partnership with BMW became really important because we had to work with someone that had a very long history in automotive safety, had built a tremendous amount of not just hardware systems but software systems in house, had the track record of continuously moving the needle at a global scale, and frankly most importantly where we could learn from tremendously. And the Neue Klasse, which my colleague will talk about very soon, is an epitome, is an example of what it means to be able to bring all of these capabilities together.
This has been a complicated partnership. It's a high-scale partnership. 1,400 engineers working across three different continents so that we have coverage across all time zones. We have engineers in the US. We have engineers here in Munich, in Ultras, in Romania. We have engineers in Korea, in Sweden supporting and building this platform together. And it wasn't just BMW and Qualcomm pulling this together. We had a variety of different very important partners. Valeo has been our very important tier one partner. AWS has been our very important hyperscaler partner. We have worked with a variety of sensor partners who've helped us pull this off. We've worked with companies that helped us with data collection, with annotation, the whole gamut. And as all of you know, automotive projects are not simple projects. If you have to scale something at a multi-country footprint, it requires everybody to be highly coordinated. And that's what we were able to pull off.
The other aspect that we spent a lot of time on was safety. And this is where we learned tremendously. For us to be able to build safety at the silicon level is one thing, but when you're developing a software stack that actually has to get deployed globally, that has to be safe where you can actually not just keep up with safety regulations, but keep them updated. Every country has their own regulations. You will hear as Mihar and I talk about what the complexity is. Safety means you have to be able to convince the regulator that you have traceability for every single possible scenario. These are complicated regulatory requirements and this is something that we are very proud that we were able to pull together in this very short period of time.
The scale of this deployment is really important. When we started off on this journey, I'll be frank, the idea of actually collecting data across 60 countries, expanding to 100 countries was something that we were obviously familiar with. But what it takes is just something that is an enormous amount of effort. We have now collected over a million kilometers of data in three and a half years. So if you rewind time a little bit and go back to 2021 where we decided that we would get into this partnership, we made the acquisition of Arriver which was a stack company inside Veoneer. We pulled them together with the Qualcomm team, formed this team of about a thousand people, formed a partnership with BMW, aimed at reaching our goal in SOP25 with a brand new car platform, the Neue Klasse, collected all of this data and delivered this end to end platform. We could not be more proud of what we've been able to go pull together. And this engine is a data engine. This is a data flywheel. We keep collecting data. We keep improving the underlying stack. Most importantly, we are improving it at global scale.
And all of this culminates in what we call the Snapdragon Ride Pilot which is basically a culmination of the Snapdragon Ride SoCs which have been around now for multiple years. These are deployed all over the world. They're deployed in Europe, in the US, in China. We have been working with a variety of different partners but now and going forward we will actually have our L2 plus highway and urban NOA stack deployed in partnership with BMW. This comes available with a variety of different sensor configurations. But most importantly, this is a stack that we make available to every OEM and every tier one.
And I could not be more proud of introducing my colleague Mihar Ayoubi who has been my partner over the last three and a half years. But before I bring him on, let's play a video introducing the Neue Klasse.
First of all, Mihar, congratulations. This has been excellent. I think maybe where we should start off with is what does Neue Klasse mean to BMW?
