Germany’s Init Buys Norwegian Start-Up Applied Autonomy to Run Driverless Buses

A small Norwegian bus-tech start-up that was running short on cash just found a much bigger owner in Germany. Init, the publicly listed transport technology company based in Karlsruhe, has taken a 67.74 percent stake in Applied Autonomy, the Kongsberg company behind Europe’s first driverless scheduled bus service in Stavanger.

The price wasn’t disclosed. Nor was a lot of the rest of the deal’s financial plumbing, which is part of the reason this sale looks less like a flashy M&A trophy and more like a rescue with strategic upside. Applied Autonomy had eight employees, revenue of about 6.2 million kroner in 2025, and a small loss. Its revenue was roughly half of what it had been in 2022. Over the summer, E24 reported that its auditor had flagged substantial uncertainty about whether the company could keep going. Founder and CEO Olav Madland had personally put in one million kroner to keep it alive, and a 1.5 million euro capital increase had been planned for September.

Init is folding the company into its Integrated Systems unit and wants to use Applied Autonomy’s xFlow platform together with its own MOBILE-ITCS system. The pitch is straightforward: one operating environment for conventional buses and autonomous ones, with real-time monitoring, remote assistance, trip coordination and data sharing built in. In German transit jargon, that remote oversight is called technical supervision.

Stavanger is the proof point. This year, the city became home to Europe’s first autonomous bus in regular scheduled service without a safety driver, running in mixed city traffic while a control center watches and intervenes if needed. Applied Autonomy says the same software is already in use at Rotterdam Airport, in Eindhoven, in Arbon in Switzerland and in Sälen in Sweden. That gives Init a live product, not a lab demo.

The German market is the obvious prize. Init says Germany is short more than 20,000 bus drivers, has around 87,500 buses, and expects about 40 percent of staff to retire over the next decade. It also leads BRAVE10k, a project backed by the German Economy Ministry that aims to prepare the ground for more than 10,000 autonomous vehicles in public transport by 2030. The competition is already lining up, from MOIA in Hamburg to ioki and Fernride, while robotaxi rivals from the US and China are well ahead.