image credit : Cruise Automation

Autonomous vehicles have been a thing! – This has made driving much more better, Although not yet fully adapted, Self driving technology has grown so much over the years with so many startups gaining huge revenues, gaining huge investments and selling for huge amounts.

Cruise Automation sold to General Motors for $1 Billion, Zoox is valued at $1.55 Billion, Quanergy raised $90 million at a $1.59 Billion valuation and also on the list is its Mega competitor Velodyne which is valued at $2 Billion after raising $150 million from Ford and Baidu and is the worlds largest LiDar manufacturer as of now.

So many startups have come to this game, The list since endless, So far we have seen so many autonomous technology startups which include:

• Almotive
• Cruise Automation
• Drive.ai
• Nauto
• Embark
• Otto
• Quanergy
• Starsky Robotics
• Velodyne
• WM Motors
• Zoox

And a slew of many others….

As the race to win the clear future of transportation, Big startups and companies have been pumping resources into self driving technology in a competition to win the self driving race, A race which is for now being led by Google’s Waymo unit with Ride hailing behemoth Uber coming second in the race.

Huge long lasting companies like Ford, Volkswagen and a host of others have seen this new innovations in their industry being made mainly by startups which have made them to make heavy investments and put in talent resources to stay on top of the line whilst partnering with these startups, Most of them, Having being founded less than a decade ago and making remarkable heavy progress
in the field.

In the video above is Cruise Automation’s fully self driving car which is currently under production and ongoing testing after having produced a previous very good version which works very well even though provision is still made for the use of a driver.

Above is the version which comes with a steering although it can move very accurately without one and is accompanied by a Ride Hailing App which people will use to book rides for a fee to their respective destinations.

Cruise was started 5 years ago by Twitch co-founder Kyle Vogt along with Justin Kan, The startup passed though Y Combinator’s incubator program the following year, It later raised a total of $18.8 million in investments and was later acquired by Automobile giant General Motors for $1 Billion.

Zoox (pictured above) is a San Francisco based secretive robotics startup specializing in autonomous mobility as a service which was founded in 2014 by Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson.

Zoox has raised a total of about $360 million to develop its fully autonomous electric vehicle fleet and to also bring the services to the market at scale.

This company counts notable VC firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Lux Capital, Billionaire movie producer Thomas Tull and technology giant Softbank led by Masayoshi Son as its major investors.

    image credit: Zoox

This image above represents one of the automobile technology Zoox worked on but it has already began new projects in addition to this but hasn’t yet unveiled them given its super-secretive nature.

Zoox was reportedly in talks to raise another $1 Billion led by its major investor Softbank at a $3-$4 Billion dollar valuation but that deal din’t happen for some unknown reasons.

Nevertheless, Zoox is a leading company in the self driving race using its pool of capital to build a new automobile system from scratch instead of just fitting ts software on current systems, With the way Zoox is going, It’s poised to be a huge leader in the self driving car industry which will be the leader in automobile transportation worldwide in soon time.

  Drive.ai

Drive.ai has also cemented itself as a major player in the autonomous vehicle field with the company recently preparing to launch its self driving program in Texas to shuttle people between destinations without drivers, Drive.ai was founded 3 years ago by a group of 7 entrepreneurs and has raised a total of $77 million to expand its self driving car program in many cities.

  Drive.ai

Drive.ai makes Artificial Intelligence software for autonomous vehicles and applies it in different vehicles to readily deliver self driving transportation to commuters in different cities, This startup counts as many as 8 notable investors in the company along with a female co-founder by name Carol Reiley among six others.

image credit : Velodyne

The last company being profiled here is Velodyne which produces the major instrument used in self driving cars which is the Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) sensors used in imaging and detecting the surroundings of the automobile accurately for the vehicles to drive safely and precisely with.

Velodyne is currently the largest manufacturer of Lidar sensors for the autonomous vehicle industry with about $200 million in last year’s revenue, The company is profitable after having raised $150 million at a $2 Billion valuation from Ford and Chinese tech giant Baidu to expand its production facilities with its very unique and large prodcution facility pictured below:

The company spun off from Velodyne Acoustics which was founded by David Hall as far back as 1983, Not until he and his brother participated in a driverless car race which marked the turning point when he decided to build sensors for upcoming races and self driving cars and then grew Velodyne into the largest Lidar producer with more than 20 self driving car partnerships and also plans to increase its production output to 1 million units every year to keep up its pace with the faster adoption of autonomous technology worldwide.

Its founder David Hall has also earned a spot on the Forbes Billionaires list with a huge net worth of $1 Billion.

All these companies just make up a part of the ongoing development in autonomous technology, This industry is developing at a very rapid rate with more and more startups coming up everyday, Autonomous driving is clearly the future, Not just limited to cars alone but also aeroplanes, flying taxis, drones and every type of vehicle out there.

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