TM Toyota Motor Corporation

Toyota Motor Corp., looking for an edge in the auto industry's race for tech talent, has hired the staff of an entire company that was making autonomous agriculture and mining equipment.

The move reflects a trend among auto makers and other industry participants, including fast-growing startups, to build their talent pools by taking over small and specialized companies, or raiding a companies workforce. In some cases, the acquisitions aren't seen as hostile.

Toyota announced Wednesday that it hired all of Jaybridge Robotics' 16 employees, including software and hardware engineers. In a release, Jaybridge's Chief Executive Jeremy Brown welcomed the move, saying it will help the Japanese auto giant "reduce the nearly 1.25 million traffic fatalities each year," rather than keep the company's efforts narrowly focused on industrial applications.

It is unclear if Jaybridge, a Cambridge-based company spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work at the Toyota Research Institute, will continue to operate. Toyota didn't buy the company, but instead hired everyone in it.

Toyota last year pledged to invest $1 billion into artificial intelligence, with a big focus on autonomous vehicles. The company hired Gill Pratt, a former MIT professor and program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to run the group. With the mass hiring, the Toyota Research Institute now has 40 employees and is loaded with people from MIT and Stanford University.

The Jaybridge group "brings decades of experience developing, testing, and supporting autonomous vehicle products which perfectly complements the world-class research team at TRI," Mr. Pratt said in a statement.

Last year, Uber Technologies Inc. hired 40 scientists, engineers and professors from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in what is becoming more common as companies fight for a rare skill set.

Competition for talent in robotics and software engineering, particularly geared toward vehicle autonomy, is so fierce that it has led to recruiting battles in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc., used his Twitter account and 2 million followers to recruit for his autonomous vehicle program.

General Motors Co., in December, bought the assets of a ride-sharing company, Sidecar, and hired 20 of its employees to work in its Silicon Valley office.

Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, said the college was sent scrambling after the Uber mass-hire in 2015, but the exposure to its top-level programs paid big dividends a year later.

Enrollment in the school's computer science program rose 35% in the fall of 2015 compared with the previous year, and its robotics program grew 30%. The school hired 17 new faculty members.

Mr. Moore said the school has had to adjust its employment agreements to allow professors to leave for business ventures with hopes of them returning after a few years.

"There is definitely a world-wide battle for talent," said Mr. Moore, who was a Google Inc. engineering vice president prior to his CMU appointment. "In the computer science world right now, administrators and leadership are becoming more like recruiters for high-powered sports teams or executives."

Write to Mike Ramsey at michael.ramsey@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 09, 2016 15:35 ET (20:35 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.