Zoox

US$500 mil raised by an Aussie in Silicon Valley for an autonomous vehicle start up giving an end valuation of Us$3.2 Billion !

Mobile Eye sold to Intel (whose chips will become redundant in 2022 as AMD will have advanced beyond Intel as admitted by Intel ) for US$15 bil. Mobile Eye had developed a chip for the operation of autonomous vehicles.

Elsight completes the communication puzzle. How much will Intel or any other big player for Elsight ?

Elsight is in play imo. The whole autonomous vehicle tech sector is in play. Its a race for these autonomous players and Elsight holds the key.

Driverless car start-up Zoox raises $673 million in new funding
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Founder Tim Kentley-Klay said Zoox plans to be ready for a full commercial launch of a "robo-taxi" service by as soon as 2020. Shaughn and John
by Tim Bradshaw
Zoox, a secretive driverless car start-up, has raised $US500 million ($673 million) in new funding as it gears up to take on larger rivals, including Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise.
The deal valued Zoox at $US2.7 billion, before the addition of the latest funds raised.
Zoox is unusual among the dozens of Silicon Valley companies pursuing self-driving cars because it is planning to build both the autonomous systems and its own electric vehicles.
Founded by Australian designer Tim Kentley-Klay in 2014, Zoox plans to be ready for a full commercial launch of a "robo-taxi" service by as soon as 2020. "By building that system under one roof, we can get to market faster," Mr Kentley-Klay said in an interview.
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Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes is joining Zoox's board after leading the latest round with a $US100 million investment. Louie Douvis
He said the new funding, which follows about $US300 million raised in earlier rounds, would fuel Zoox's development and testing until "late next year". The company already has more than 500 employees.
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More than 50 companies, from traditional automakers to small start-ups, are testing self-driving cars on the streets of California.
Despite fatal crashes involving Tesla and Uber's autonomous vehicles this year, the sector continues to attract huge amounts of capital, including into Pony.ai, which is based in China and Silicon Valley and has raised more than $US200 million in recent months, and GM's Cruise unit, which received a $US2.25 billion investment from SoftBank's Vision Fund in May.
The companies are vying for engineering talent with expertise in artificial intelligence, computer vision, navigation and safety.
Granted permits
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The Zoox auto-drive start-up. Twitter
The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees autonomous testing in the state, has granted Zoox permits for 14 self-driving cars and 80 test drivers. That makes the company's public fleet in its home state significantly smaller than those of rivals such as GM Cruise, with 117 cars, Waymo with 72 vehicles, and Apple, which had 66 permits.
Nonetheless, Mr Kentley-Klay says his technology is superior to that of rivals, including Cruise, which like Zoox does a lot of testing on the busy, complex streets of downtown San Francisco. Zoox also tests in virtual simulations and on private tracks.
"We are doing the steepest streets in San Francisco today autonomously," he said. "We don't see our competitors driving in those environments. This company was born to solve megacity mobility."
Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Australian co-founder and co-chief executive of software company Atlassian, is joining Zoox's board after leading the latest round with a $US100 million investment, through his personal fund Grok Ventures. Primavera Capital, the China-based investment firm led by Fred Hu, former Greater China chairman at Goldman Sachs, is jointly leading the round.

"For city driving, Zoox is the best that I can see," said Mr Cannon-Brookes, who has been involved with Zoox since its earliest days as an investor in Australia-based venture fund Blackbird Ventures. "It's not just going down the road on a sunny day in Arizona; [it works] in rain, in tunnels, in darkness."
He added: "It is the only company of scale that is looking to take advantage of all three major changes happening in automobiles simultaneously" – electrification, autonomy and ride-sharing.


Financial Times