Rivian’s latest acquisition aims to make EV route planning better

Rivian acquired the company behind ABetterRouteplanner, a popular route planning app used by EV drivers, CEO RJ Scaringe confirmed Wednesday.

Scaringe didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal to buy Iternio, the Swedish company that developed A Better Routeplanner, otherwise known as ABRP.  The acquisition was first reported earlier this month by Electrek. Reuters confirmed the deal during an interview with Scaringe.

ABRP, a consumer-facing app that calculates the best route for EV drivers, using information about the vehicle, weather conditions, traffic and real-time charger data, was started in 2016 as a hobby project by Bo Lincoln, who went on to found Iternio in 2018. While ABRP has a popular following, the real value for Rivian is Iternio’s EV planning API and cloud service for businesses. The largest customer of the API is ABRP.

ABRP will remain a standalone app, Reuters reported. Iternio’s EV planning API will be integrated into Rivian’s app and its infotainment system. The technology has been integrated in Polestar 2 since 2021.