Faction

The latest fundraising round from Faction crossed my LinkedIn feed today. Their tagline is, “Faction develops driverless vehicles that have the speed and performance of cars, but at the cost of a motorcycle.”

This makes a ton of sense to me. Autonomous vehicles are likely to converge on form factors radically different than the four-door, four-wheel vehicles that have been designed for human drivers and owners.

I met Faction CEO Ain McKendrick several years ago, when I was at Udacity and he was at Cngyn. Cngyn is a below-the-radar company that builds self-driving vehicles for industrial environments, like ports and mines. I imagine that experience gives Faction a headstart in figuring out how to work with unconventional vehicles.

Faction is the first AV company I can remember coming out of Y-Combinator, although surely it must not be the only one. AVs require timelines and levels of funding out of the gate that seem beyond the incubator model.

Nonetheless, Faction managed to land Trucks VC as an investor. They’re the smartest folks in the business, so that is a real vote of confidence.