Ford just made a $1 billion investment in a self-driving AI company no one has heard of

Ford just announced a massive $1 billion investment in a startup that hadn't even gone public before today.

It's one of the auto industry's single largest investments in self-driving tech and sounds like a desperate move to stay relevant in the self-driving race with Waymo, Tesla and others — until you find out the company, Argo AI, is led by two self-driving tech industry vets who held leadership positions on the autonomous development teams at Google and Uber before striking out on their own.

This follows Ford's pledge to put fully autonomous cars on roads by 2021 and rebrand as a "mobility company." Ford's Autonomous Vehicle Development program recently unveiled a new version of its self-driving Fusion design, but this new investment will shift focus to the development of a virtual driver system, which serves as  the "brains" that control autonomous vehicles.

The announcement came late this afternoon, via a Medium post authored by Ford President and CEO Mark Fields.

He called the investment, which is spaced over five years, "an important step for Ford on the road to full autonomy," reiterating the 2021 target. He also outlined a plan for maximizing the company's ROI by giving Argo AI a directive to work on "developing technology that could be licensed to others in the future."

For its part, Argo AI, founded by Bryan Salesky (Google) and Peter Rander (Uber), is looking to go on a hiring spree to build out the company. It's based in Pittsburgh, with engineering centers in other self-driving development hubs in Michigan and California.

The decision to focus squarely on AI systems and engineering puts Ford on a similar track as Waymo. The former Google project is also focused on building out its platform with an eye on licensing to other automakers in the future. Ford is pushing the pace in the race to the first dominant self-driving platform — we'll see if it makes it to the finish line by 2021.