Bengaluru-based self-driving vehicle startup Minus Zero announced it has raised $ 1.7 million in a funding round led by Chiratae Ventures.
JITO Angel Network and senior executives from tech companies like Nvidia, and Lyft also participated in the funding round.
The funding will be primarily utilized for building an extensive autonomous vehicle research and development, infrastructure and hiring more people. The team is eyeing a public launch of their first autonomous vehicle use-case by late 2022 to early 2023.
“With multiple patents in the pipeline, our proprietary approach towards self-driving mimics human intuition giving the software an ability to gain confident insights even with lesser data inputs,” said Gagandeep Reehal, CEO & CTO of Minus Zero. “This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, harsh weather, etc. would have otherwise compromised with the safety of the vehicle.”
“Autonomous vehicles (AV) are no more a thing of the future and need to become a reality now. Scaling AV adoption beyond the current limited usage in specific cities and high-end cars, requires a reimagination beyond relying on expensive technologies like Lidar and training over millions of hours of data,” said TCM Sundaram, founder & vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures. “Further, emerging markets like India with difficult and unstructured driving conditions, the approach to AV needs to be novel and specifically tailored. The Minus Zero team brings a fresh approach to AV and build for mass adoption in entry and mid-level cars and emerging markets,” he said.
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