What's going on?

At the Frankfurt Motor Show on Thursday, Samsung announced that it was launching a $300 million investment fund aimed at technology startups in the automotive sphere.

What does this mean?

Samsung has been building its own tech to power and assist self-driving cars since about 2015, and the company gained some crucial access to the automotive industry when it bought Harman, an audio and auto parts supplier for about $8 billion a few months ago.

Samsung says that it wants to link together the tech from the companies in which it will invest with Harman�s connections in the automotive industry and Samsung�s own expertise in consumer technologies. It�ll then target existing automakers and automotive suppliers in the hopes of harnessing these fast-growing markets over the next few years.

Why should I care?

The bigger picture: The wave of investment in self-driving cars continues�

Samsung joins a group of several big tech corporations that are setting up their own investment funds to finance startups related to automotive tech and self-driving cars. Other companies, like Samsung�s rivals Intel and Qualcomm, are just outright acquiring them � and that�s not even to mention what the big automakers are up to! One big trend is that companies are focusing more on delivering autonomous driving systems (i.e. software for the cars) rather than manufacturing the vehicles themselves, a project from which even Apple has started to scale back.

For markets: Investors are buying into the future of automotive tech.

Stock in Tesla, arguably the posterchild of automotive tech, has increased by more than 1200% since it was first publicly traded in 2013. Meanwhile, investments of all kinds in automotive tech passed $1 billion, in aggregate, last year and are expected to keep growing. According to Blackrock, a huge investment manager, companies anchored in software and semiconductors will be the most successful in this market.