Luminar announces a lot of news, to the point that I can’t really tell how impactful any individual announcement is. But Luminar still feels to me like the company best-positioned to offer an alternative to Mobileye in the advanced driver assistance space. Almost every other company in the space is either a specialized sensor or software supplier, or a large integrator, like a Tier 1 supplier.
Luminar seems to have the best combination of comprehensive hardware plus software expertise.
Blade seems like a step in that direction. You could imagine a vehicle manufacturer purchasing Blades without really having to think about how they work. Just design Blades onto the roof and get a perception stack, no problem.
Obviously that’s a naive projection, but that’s the turn-key solution the industry would love.
Waymo, Kodiak, and my own employer, Cruise, all announced fundraising in the last 48 hours.
Waymo announced a monster $2.5 billion funding round, consisting of a wide array of investors:
“Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Magna International, Mubadala Investment Company, Perry Creek Capital, Silver Lake, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Temasek, and Tiger Global.”
Kodiak announced a seemingly smaller round of investment from Bridgestone, the tire company. Or, more accurately, Bridgestone announced an investment of undisclosed size into Kodiak.
“Bridgestone Americas (Bridgestone) today announced it has made a minority investment in Kodiak Robotics, a leading U.S.-based self-driving trucking company. The partnership will allow Bridgestone to integrate its smart-sensing tire technologies and fleet solutions into Kodiak’s level 4 autonomous trucks.”
Cruise announced a slightly different variant of fundraising, a $5 billion line of credit from GM Financial Financial. We will use the money to build self-driving Origin vehicles, the purpose-designed autonomous vehicle that Cruise and GM are creating together.
“Today we’re announcing that GM Financial, the automotive financing arm of GM, is working with Cruise and providing a $5 billion line of credit so we can efficiently finance the expansion of our fleet as we scale up over the next few years. This bumps up Cruise’s total war chest to over $10 billion as we enter commercialization.”
None of these fundraises mention a valuation. Cruise’s credit line would not normally trigger a valuation change for a privately-held company, and the Cruise News page still lists “$30b+” as the company’s valuation.
Waymo’s valuation has been the subject of a lot of speculation. Prior to this most recent raise, speculation and reporting converged on a $30 billion valuation.
Kodiak’s valuation is probably a couple of orders of magnitude smaller that $30 billion. The Bridgestone investment impresses me, although it’s hard to judge without knowing how big the investment was. In an environment where Waymo and Cruise are working in the tens of billions of dollars, financing a normal-sized startup – a hundred people or so, and a valuation around $100 million or so – is a real challenge.
Sri is a teenage phenom who combines an engaging social media profile with impressive projects on a wide variety of software engineering projects.
I particularly appreciate Sri’s summary of the neural networks in his perception stack. Not only did Sri train a network to detect and classify traffic lights, which is a component of the Capstone, but he also trained MobileNet-SSD to detect cars and pedestrians, which goes above and beyond the requirements.
Several years have now passed since I was part of the team that built this project for Udacity. We had so much fun, and I’m delighted to see that students like Sri are still enjoying it!
The autonomous aerial vehicle company, Kitty Hawk, founded and run by my former Udacity boss, Sebastian Thrun, has acquired 3D Robotics, the drone company founded by Chris Anderson. Anderson will become COO.
Some personal/professional news: I'll be joining @kittyhawkcorp (Larry Page & Sebastian Thrun's eVTOL company) as COO as part of a 3DR acquisition. The path from drones to remotely-piloted passenger aircraft is becoming increasingly clear, especially from a FAA cert basis…
Like Sebastian, Chris is many things. Probably most famously, he is the author of The Long Tail, which popularized that concept with the tech community. He is also the father of five children, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, and a popular tweeter.
I know Chris principally from his organization of DIY Robocars, which is a kind of Homebrew Computer Club for the Bay Area autonomous vehicle community. Although I’ve never built a DIY robocar myself, I regularly pack my son up and drive him to the East Bay to watch the competitors zip their autonomous cars around the indoor track.
I am excited to see what Chris Anderson and the 3DR team does for Kitty Hawk.
A thread on the boom-bust-boom cycles of autonomous transportation
I love this Domino’s commercial, featuring Nuro’s self-driving delivery vehicles.
The commercial played tonight during the Suns-Nuggets NBA playoff game. According to the YouTube date, this commercial has been up since April, but tonight was the first time I saw it. Autonomous vehicles go prime time!
As a side note, I inherited the Phoenix Suns from my father thirty years ago, which was an absolute disaster for the last ten years of my life. But this season has been so much fun!
Last week I wrote about Faction, a Y-Combinator start-up creating autonomous motorcycle-class vehicles. I’m now listening to an episode of The Eccentric CEO podcast in which host Aman Agarwal interviews Faction founder Ain McKendrick.
McKendrick talks a lot about how thoroughly motorcycle-class vehicles like rickshaws and scooters have penetrated Asia, but how rare they are in North America. Food for thought.
“Graze is building electric, autonomous lawn mowers specifically for the commercial landscaping industry to counter labor shortages and rising wages in the US.”
What I love about this is how huge the opportunity is and simultaneously how trivial it seems. That’s kind of a perfect combination.
Graze touts commercial landscaping as a $100 billion industry. I believe it. I’ve always heard just how insanely expensive turf management is.
And yet.
This isn’t a vehicle traveling 25 mph down city streets. It’s not even a tractor, which has the potential to wreck a field and impair the food supply.
The worst thing that’s going to happen here is the golf greens get chewed up and they have to order replacement sod.
Honestly, it just seems like a lot of fun. I know nothing about the company or the team or their prospects. But it’s a great market and they’re taking investors!
University of Toronto computer science professor Raquel Urtasun is launching a self-driving car startup called Waabi, as my Forbes editor Alan Ohnsman reports. Urtasun created the KITTI dataset, which remains a standard benchmark for robotic perception. She also joined Uber ATG as their chief scientist.
My friends at Uber ATG always had great things to say about her, so I’m excited she’s going out on her own. It’s also a natural result of Uber’s sale of ATG to Aurora, which is a minority investor in Waabi.
Waabi is launching with an $83.5 million funding round. For context, that’s more money than Voyage raised in total, across four years and deployment with real passengers (and safety operators). Waabi should be able to do a lot with $83.5 million dollars, presumably all the more so in Toronto, a lower cost region than Silicon Valley. According to TechCrunch, Waabi already employs 40 people.
Waabi seems likely to pursue a machine-learning first approach to autonomous vehicle development, based both on Urtasun’s statements and her academic background. Even the name, “Waabi”, hints at the goal.
Waabi means “she has vision” in Ojibwe and “simple” in Japanese.
Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch
Ohnsman reports in Forbes that Waabi plans to focus “heavily on cutting-edge AI tools and less of what Urtasun calls a traditional ‘robotics’ mindset.” Urtasun is a deep learning expert, so I would expect to see a deep-learning-first approach at Waabi, or maybe even a deep-learning-only approach.
“You end up with an approach that requires much less to actually develop. It’s much less capital-intensive and doesn’t require this driving and driving and driving on the road. You get much more automated, fast-paced solutions, and with the ability to come up with much more complex systems.”
Raquel Urtasun in Forbes.com
That focus is reminiscent of Drive.ai, which applied a similar ML-first philosophy to self-driving cars, and also had an academic foundation. Drive.ai eventually ran out of funds and was acquihired by Apple.
Deep learning continues to advance, however, and with Urtasun at the helm, a deep-learning-first approach to self-driving may finally be poised to succeed.
“Cruise is the first entrant into the CPUC’s Driverless Pilot program, in which passengers can ride in a test vehicle that operates without a driver in the vehicle.”
California Public Utilities Commission
CPUC regulates taxis and other transportation carriers in the state. As always, Kirsten Korosec at TechCrunchnicely summarizes the news.
“In order to launch a commercial service for passengers here in the state of California, you need both the California DMV and the California PUC to issue deployment permits. Today we are honored to have been the first to receive a driverless autonomous service permit to test transporting passengers from the California PUC.”
Prashanthi Raman, Cruise Director of Government Affairs, in TechCrunch
Trucks Venture Capital just closed their second fund, at a size of $52,525,252. I don’t understand the significance of that number, other than the periodicity. In any case, congratulations to them!
Trucks is the preeminent mobility-focused venture capital firm in San Francisco, and arguably the world. They’ve been a big fish in a small pond, and the pond has been getting bigger, so now they are getting bigger.
Reilly Brennan, one of the founders of the firm, is well-known in the industry for his weekly Future of Transportation newsletter.
Trucks’ portfolio includes AEye, Bear Flag Robotics, Gatik, Joby, May Mobility, nuTonomy, Starsky Robotics, and many other mobility startups. Several of those companies have exited, one way or another, which is a credit to the firm.
They’re also launching a Growth Fund, to invest in larger companies, ideally companies from their seed funds that have grown into larger funding needs. The fund is open to the public right now, so take a look and consider participating!
The Growth Fund has an unusual structure, in which participants can provide $5,000 or more per quarter, and each quarter gets its own fund. I think this means you could invest as little as $5,000 in the growth fund (although you must be an accredited investor).
David Silver 