VW invests $2.6 billion in self-driving startup Argo AI as part of Ford alliance

VW Group is investing $2.6 billion in capital and assets into Argo AI, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle startup that burst onto the scene two years ago with $1 billion in backing from Ford. The deal, which has been rumored for months, is part of a broader alliance between VW Group and Ford that covers autonomous and electric vehicles.

The Argo piece of this tie-up involves more than just an injection of capital in return for a stake in the startup and board seats. It turns Argo into a global company, or at least one with operations in U.S. and Europe. And it instantly boosts its staff by 40%.

The deal is a validation of Argo’s tech and, by adding one more customer, the startup diversifies and gains some independence from Ford, its first investor and customer. Argo is still a private company in which VW and Ford have taken holdings.

“Argo is now officially a technology platform company,” Argo CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky said in a press conference Friday morning in New York.

VW has committed $1 billion in capital to the startup and also will purchase Argo AI shares from Ford for $500 million over three years. Ford will invest the remaining $600 million of its previously announced $1 billion cash commitment in Argo AI.

VW is also handing over Autonomous Intelligent Driving, the self-driving subsidiary that was launched just two years ago to develop autonomous vehicle technology for the Volkswagen Group. AID is valued at $1.6 billion.

The Munich-based AID team will become Argo’s European headquarters, a move that will expand its staff 40% to more than 700 employees.

“Our agreement with Volkswagen positions us as a technology platform company, expands the potential geography for deployment and will further fuel our product development,” Salesky wrote in a blog post detailing the announcement.

The deal raises Argo’s valuation to more than $7 billion. Despite the extra contribution of AID, Ford and VW Group will hold equal stakes in Argo. The remaining equity has been set aside for employees, the companies said Friday.

“This is a win-win situation,” Volkswagen CEO Dr. Herbert Diess said in the press conference. “The collaboration brings some of the smartest people in the field of autonomous driving. Together, software and hardware experts will work side by side to tackle the challenge of developing a safely deployable autonomous vehicle.”

The deal, which is expected to close in the first half of 2020, is still subject to the approval of regulators, Diess noted. Argo’s board will now be comprised of two VW seats, two Ford seats and three Argo seats.

Argo AI is developing the virtual driver system and high-definition maps designed for Ford’s self-driving vehicles. Now, that expands to VW.

For the past two years, Argo AI has done much of its testing in Pittsburgh, where it’s based. The company is also testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Austin, Miami, Palo Alto, Washington, D.C. and Dearborn, Mich. It recently expanded testing to Detroit, specifically Corktown and sections of downtown around Campus Martius Park.

Argo will treat VW and Ford as separate customers, although there will be some collaboration, which will help both companies share costs, Ford CEO Jim Hackett noted during the press conference.

This means Volkswagen and Ford will independently integrate Argo AI’s self-driving systems into its own purpose-built vehicles. Argo AI’s focus remains on delivering a SAE Level 4-capable SDS to be applied for ridesharing and goods delivery services in dense urban areas.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec,  July 12, 2019

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ZongMu Technology raises $14.5 million for driver assistance products

It’s anticipated that the autonomous vehicles market will reach $667.77 billion by 2026, and according to marketing firm ABI, as many as 8 million driverless cars will be added to the road in 2025.

Startups like ZongMu Technology are taking full advantage of the influx of venture capital, unsurprisingly. The Shanghai-based company today revealed that it has secured a $14.5 million follow-on series C investment led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Lenovo Group’s Legend Capital and Chuangtu Investment.

The fresh funding comes after a roughly $14.5 million series B in February 2017 and brings ZongMu’s total raised to about $30 million at a valuation of $146 million (RMB1 billion). “This round of funding is of vital significance as it will not only boost the development of our technology, but will make contributions to explore more opportunities in both domestic and foreign markets as well,” said ZongMu founder Tang Rui in a statement.

ZongMu — which is headquartered in Shanghai Pudong Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park with research and development subsidiaries in Beijing and Xiamen — focuses the bulk of its research and development efforts on advanced driver assistance systems. Solutions in its growing portfolio address lane departure and blind spot detection, in addition to things like door open warnings.

One of its flagship products is SurroundView, a camera system that stitches together four feeds from fisheye lens-equipped sensors and corrects for distortion and warped perspective, displaying the finished video on an in-vehicle screen. Meanwhile, ZongMu’s forthcoming automated valet parking, which is expected to launch in the second half of 2020, will enable drivers to leave their cars in designated drop-off areas and summon them with their smartphones, much like Tesla’s Enhanced Summon.

ZongMu also offers a “mobility solution” service that facilitates fleet management and operations, and which interfaces with third-party products and services like garage payment, parking slot reservation, and wireless charging systems. It’s complemented by the company’s Automatic Parking Assistant, which detects parking slots in lots by fusing and analyzing data from cameras and ultrasonic sensors.

ZongMu claims to have long-term strategic partnerships with a number of original equipment manufacturers and tier-one suppliers, and it says its products are currently sourced by China-based automakers and parts suppliers including Geely Automobile Holdings, SAIC Motor, and Yema Auto.

Another reliable client is Qualcomm, unsurprisingly. ZongMu and the San Jose chipmaker unveiled the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820A at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, which powers the infotainment systems in select Volkswagen models. (A demo at the conference used a proprietary ZongMu AI model that output multi-class object detection and road semantic segmentation simultaneously.)

“Qualcomm Ventures is glad to invest in ZongMu to accelerate pace of 5G revolution in auto industry,” said Qualcomm Ventures’ Shen Jing.

ZongMu’s revenue grew from $16,193 (RMB111,300) in 2014 to about $6.11 million (RMB42 million) in 2016, according to public disclosures, increasing by 379 times in the span of two years.

Source. Weekly Review, Kyle Wiggers, July 2, 2019

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Humanising Autonomy pulls in $5M to help self-driving cars keep an eye on pedestrians

Pretty much everything about making a self-driving car is difficult, but among the most difficult parts is making sure the vehicles know what pedestrians are doing — and what they’re about to do. Humanising Autonomy specializes in this, and hopes to become a ubiquitous part of people-focused computer vision systems worldwide.

The company has raised a $5.3 million seed round from an international group of investors on the strength of its AI system, which it claims outperforms humans and works on images from practically any camera you might find in a car these days.

HA’s tech is a set of machine learning modules trained to identify different pedestrian behaviors — is this person about to step into the street? Are they paying attention? Have they made eye contact with the driver? Are they on the phone? Things like that.

The company credits the robustness of its models to two main things. First, the variety of its data sources.

“Since day one we collected data from any type of source — CCTV cameras, dash cams of all resolutions, but also autonomous vehicle sensors,” said co-founder and CEO Maya Pindeus. “We’ve also built data partnerships and collaborated with different institutions, so we’ve been able to build a robust data set across different cities with different camera types, different resolutions and so on. That’s really benefited the system, so it works in nighttime, rainy Michigan situations, etc.”

Notably their models rely only on RGB data, forgoing any depth information that might come from lidar, another common sensor type. But Pindeus said that type of data isn’t by any means incompatible, it just isn’t as plentiful or relevant as real-world, visual-light footage.

In particular, HA was careful to acquire and analyze footage of accidents, because these are especially informative cases of failure of AVs or human drivers to read pedestrian intentions, or vice versa.

The second advantage Pindeus claimed is the modular nature of the models the company has created. There isn’t one single “what is that pedestrian doing” model, but a set of them that can be individually selected and tuned according to the autonomous agent’s or hardware’s needs.

For instance, if you want to know if someone is distracted as they’re crossing the street. There’s a lot of things that we do as humans to tell if someone is distracted,” she said. “We have all these different modules that kind of come together to predict whether someone’s distracted, at risk, etc. This allows us to tune it to different environments, for instance London and Tokyo — people behave differently in different environments.”

“The other thing is processing requirements; Autonomous vehicles have a very strong GPU requirement,” she continued. “But because we build in these modules, we can adapt it to different processing requirements. Our software will run on a standard GPU when we integrate with level 4 or 5 vehicles, but then we work with aftermarket, retrofitting applications that don’t have as much power available, but the models still work with that. So we can also work across levels of automation.”

The idea is that it makes little sense to aim only for the top levels of autonomy when really there are almost no such cars on the road, and mass deployment may not happen for years. In the meantime, however, there are plenty of opportunities in the sensing stack for a system that can simply tell the driver that there’s a danger behind the car, or activate automatic emergency braking a second earlier than existing systems.

While there are lots of papers published about detecting pedestrian behavior or predicting what a person in an image is going to do, there are few companies working specifically on that task. A full-stack sensing company focusing on lidar and RGB cameras needs to complete dozens or hundreds of tasks, depending on how you define them: object characterizations and tracking, watching for signs, monitoring nearby and distant cars and so on. It may be simpler for them and for manufacturers to license HA’s functioning and highly specific solution rather than build their own or rely on more generalized object tracking.

“There are also opportunities adjacent to autonomous vehicles,” pointed out Pindeus. Warehouses and manufacturing facilities use robots and other autonomous machines that would work better if they knew what workers around them were doing. Here the modular nature of the HA system works in its favor again — retraining only the parts that need to be retrained is a smaller task than building a new system from scratch.

Currently the company is working with mobility providers in Europe, the U.S. and Japan, including Daimler Mercedes Benz and Airbus. It’s got a few case studies in the works to show how its system can help in a variety of situations, from warning vehicles and pedestrians about each other at popular pedestrian crossings to improving path planning by autonomous vehicles on the road. The system can also look over reams of past footage and produce risk assessments of an area or time of day given the number and behaviors of pedestrians there.

The $5 million seed round, led by Anthemis, with Japan’s Global Brain, Germany’s Amplifier and SV’s Synapse Partners, will mostly be dedicated to commercializing the product, Pindeus said.

“The tech is ready, now it’s about getting it into as many stacks as possible, and strengthening those tier 1 relationships,” she said.

Obviously it’s a rich field to enter, but still quite a new one. The tech may be ready to deploy, but the industry won’t stand still, so you can be sure that Humanising Autonomy will move with it.

Source. TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey, June 19, 2019

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GM Cruise raises $1.15B at a $19B valuation from SoftBank and Honda

By Kirsten Korosec

GM Cruise has raised another $1.15 billion in new equity from a group of investors that includes T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda, SoftBank Vision Fund and its parent company GM, as the self-driving vehicle company pushes to launch a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service this year.

This investment increases Cruise’s post-money valuation to $19 billion, inclusive of SoftBank’s previously announced investment commitment. Cruise has secured capital commitments totaling $7.25 billion in the past year, according to the company.

“Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation,” said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann . “Having deep resources to draw on as we pursue our mission is a critical competitive advantage.”

GM Cruise has one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. GM’s self-driving unit has stuck to its previously stated timeline to launch a commercial service “sometime in 2019.”

Cruise has grown from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 today at its San Francisco headquarters.

And Cruise isn’t curtailing that rate of growth; it’s accelerating it.

Cruise announced in November plans to expand to Seattle, in pursuit of more engineering talent to develop its technology. GM Cruise aimed to hire between 100 to 200 engineers by the end of 2019. The company, now led by Ammann, who left his post as president of GM to take the job, plans to hire at least 1,000 more engineers and other personnel by the end of the year. (Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who was CEO and also unofficially handled the chief technology officer position, is now president and CTO.)

Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, left the file-sharing and storage company to head up human resources at Cruise and help the company scale quickly.

The GM subsidiary is expanding its office space in San Francisco to accommodate the growth. GM Cruise will keep its headquarters at 1201 Bryant Street in San Francisco. The company also will take over Dropbox headquarters at 333 Brannan Street some time this year, a move that will triple Cruise’s office space in San Francisco.

GM Cruise received a $2.25 billion investment by SoftBank’s vision fund in May 2018. That first SoftBank investment was cut into two parts, with the first tranche of $900 million made at the closing of the transaction. Once Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial deployment, SoftBank will complete the second investment of $1.35 billion, the companies said at the time.

A few months later, Honda committed $2.75 billion as part of an exclusive agreement with GM and Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle.

As part of that agreement, Honda will invest $2 billion into the effort over the next 12 years. At the time, Honda made an immediate and direct equity investment of $750 million into Cruise. Honda’s investment gives the automaker a 5.7% stake in Cruise.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec, May 6, 2019

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Rivian has announced an equity investment round of 700M led by Amazon

PLYMOUTH, Mich., Feb. 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivian has announced an equity investment round of $700M led by Amazon. The investment comes on the heels of Rivian's reveal of the all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show last November.

Starting with a clean sheet, Rivian has developed its vehicles with adventurers at the core of every design and engineering decision. The company's launch products, the R1T and R1S, deliver up to 400+ miles of range and provide an unmatched combination of performance, off-road capability and utility. These vehicles use the company's flexible skateboard platform and will be produced at Rivian's manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill., with customer deliveries expected to start in late 2020.

"This investment is an important milestone for Rivian and the shift to sustainable mobility," said RJ Scaringe, Rivian Founder and CEO. "Beyond simply eliminating compromises that exist around performance, capability and efficiency, we are working to drive innovation across the entire customer experience. Delivering on this vision requires the right partners, and we are excited to have Amazon with us on our journey to create products, technology and experiences that reset expectations of what is possible."

"We're inspired by Rivian's vision for the future of electric transportation," said Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer. "RJ has built an impressive organization, with a product portfolio and technology to match. We're thrilled to invest in such an innovative company."

Rivian will remain an independent company. Amazon is leading the round, which includes participation from existing shareholders. Additional details about this investment are not being disclosed at this time.

About Rivian

Rivian is developing vehicles, technology and services that inspire people to get out and explore the world.  With a team of more than 750 people, Rivian has development centers in Plymouth, Mich.; San Jose, Calif.; Irvine, Calif; and Surrey, England; along with a 2.6-million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Normal, Ill. Rivian will launch the R1T and R1S in the US in late 2020, with introduction to other global geographies starting in 2021. Rivian is now accepting preorders on its R1T and R1S. More information is available at www.rivian.com.

Source. Rivian Press Release, PR Newswire, February 15, 2019