- Start up a self-driving car
minus zero has raised $1.7 million in a seed round led by Chiratae Ventures. - The company plans to get its first vehicle on the road in late 2022 to early 2023.
- The Bengaluru-based startup uses a combination of camera-based vision and algorithms for its self-driving solution.
Minus Zero – India’s first startup building affordable fully self-driving cars in India – has raised $1.7 million in a round-up led by Chiratae Ventures. JITO Angel Network, a pair of senior executives from US chipmaker NVIDIA and US ride hailing service Lyft that competes with Uber, also joined the round.
Min Zero plans to use this capital to build elaborate
“Minus Zero believes that the complexity of self-driving cars cannot be solved by stacking more sensors or petabytes of data, but by making AI more intuitive, similar to the way our own brain handles decision-making,” the company said. in a press release. a media statement.
The Bengaluru-based startup — founded by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra in 2021 — uses a combination of camera-based vision and algorithms to power its self-driving technology. The company claims to have multiple patents “in the pipeline” and a proprietary approach to self-driving that mimics human intuition, giving the software the ability to gain confident insights even with less data input.
“This enables robust decision making, which is critical for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors such as poor traffic infrastructure, reckless driving, harsh weather conditions, etc. would have compromised vehicle safety,” Gagandeep Reehal, CEO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Minus Zero, said.
TCM Sundaram, founder and vice-chairman of Chiratae Ventures, believes that autonomous vehicles are no longer a thing of the future and must now become a reality. He noted that scaling autonomous vehicles outside certain cities requires a new imagination beyond reliance on expensive technologies.
Minus Zero, still in its infancy, competes with global tech giants Tesla and Google, which have been trying to crack self-driving technology for years. Currently, no major player in India is experimenting with autonomous vehicles as the technology is expected to take longer adoption time due to traffic congestion, complex terrain and other reasons.
