Highlights:
• Autonomous vehicle startup
• Chiratae Ventures leads a $1.7 million seed round for Minus Zero
• Goal is to hasten the world’s transition to driverless mobility
Minus Zero, co-founded by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, aims to popularise self-driving cars in India. In April of last year, it successfully tested its prototype, an autonomous electric rickshaw, in Jalandhar, Punjab.
Overview
“It could detect traffic, obstacles, parking spaces, and lanes and adjust accordingly,” Reehal told FE. “In the future, our goal is to have our own autonomous vehicle fleet, so that the public can ride in autonomous vehicles like they do today in conventional cabs.”
It announced on Monday 23 may that it has raised $1.7 million in a seed round led by Chiratae Ventures, with participation from JITO Angel Network and a stalwart profile of angels from the AV ecosystem, including senior executives from Nvidia and Lyft based in Silicon Valley, among others.
“We are on our way to making driverless vehicles not only affordable but also a reality much sooner,” Reehal added.
Driverless mobility
“Our goal is to hasten the world’s transition to driverless mobility by avoiding the costly HD maps, Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), extensive data collection, and mini supercomputers that are commonly mistaken for the only path to autonomous vehicle reality.”
“Minus Zero believes that the complexity of self-driving cars can be solved by making AI more intuitive, similar to how our brain handles decision making.”
“In a race to market where trillion-dollar tech companies have already spent billions, Minus Zero’s differentiated approach could prove to be a game-changer in the self-driving vehicle ecosystem,” says the company.
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