A large number of automotive engineers reportedly have left Apple Inc. in the last few months to work for a self-driving car startup called Zoox Inc.

The departures are said to be the result of a decision by Apple to wind down its own autonomous vehicle project. Bloomberg reported that 17 engineers have left Apple for Zoox in the past few months, after the iPhone maker “scaled back” plans to build its own self-driving car in favor of an autonomous driving system to be used by other car manufacturers.

Reports that Apple was working on a self-driving car project, codenamed “Project Titan,” first appeared back in February 2015. Around that time, the company hired dozens of engineers from Detroit-based car manufacturers with skills in fields unrelated to autonomous car systems per se, such as braking and suspension systems.

However, the project quickly proved to be too ambitious for Apple. Less than two years later the company admitted it was unlikely to realize its plans due to what it said were “months of strategy disagreements, leadership flux and supply chain challenges.” Due to these problems, around 1,000 Project Titan staff were reassigned or let go in October 2016.

Project Titan suffered another blow this summer when Apple’s chief executive officer went on the record to say that the company was looking at building autonomous car driving systems to be used in vehicles built by partner manufacturers. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important,” Cook told Bloomberg in June.

As such, Zoox looks to be a much more suitable employer for Apple’s engineers. Although it has mostly stayed under the radar until now, the startup has been making significant progress. The company won permission to test its self-driving cars on California’s roads as far back as March 2016, and followed that up eight months later with a $50 million funding round that valued it at $1.5 billion.

More recently, Zoox made headlines after announcing it was hiring Mark Rosekind as its chief safety innovation officer. Rosekind previously served as the chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Barack Obama.

“Zoox has an integrated, full-system approach to transforming mobility that is unique across the autonomous vehicle landscape,” Rosekind said at the time. “Joining Zoox represents an opportunity to deliver on my deeply held belief that safety innovation will be critical in the transition to autonomous mobility.”

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