Ghost Autonomy Inc. has shuttered operations citing lack of financing, the company told the Business Journal.
The Mountain View autonomous driving software company said the decision to shut down was made “fairly quickly” after failing to find an alternative business plan. John Hayes, the company’s CEO, said it was better to shut down all at once as opposed to going through multiple rounds of layoffs.
“We found, there was a lot of interest in the next cycle, which is a lot more around urban autonomy,” Hayes told the Business Journal. “But for that, you’re talking about products that were shipping in 2029, and we ultimately just couldn’t get financing to survive for that long period of time. The binary decision in the end, was whether we could fund for a very long period of time or not.”
The move impacts close to 100 employees across its Mountain View, Dallas and Sydney, Australia operations. According to LinkedIn, the company had upwards of 20 employees working on the Bay Area.
According to Hayes, the company decided to shut down now in order to provide employees severance. However, he declined to provide specifics on what that looks like for those impacted.
“(Providing severance) was something that drove our decision because we don’t want to make the decision when the bank account is zero and you can’t provide the reasonable severance,” he said.
The move comes a few months after Ghost Autonomy received a $5 million investment from OpenAI and partnered with the AI poster child’s startup fund giving it access to Azure resources and OpenAI’s systems.
Since its inception in 2017, when it was first known as Ghost Locomotion, the company raised close to $219 million, and according to PitchBook Data, investors last valued the company at $109 million. The majority came in 2021 when Sutter Hill Ventures, Founders Fund and Coatue co-led a $100 million Series D round. At that time the company also shifted its focused to develop crash prevention technology.
The company came out of stealth in 2019 with the hopes of developing a kit that would have allowed for autonomous driving on highways. Though it shifted its focus in an attempt to go to market faster.
Over Ghost Autonomy’s seven-year history the company has had backers such as Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures, Keith Rabois of Founders Fund and Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, arguably some of the biggest names in venture capital.
“We started the company in a really different funding environment. We were caught up with a funding environment that just changed dramatically in 2022,” Hayes explained. “The original strategy that we had, which was a long (research and development) period and the ability to support long term engagements with automotive companies, just became untenable. I don’t think that’s something we could have predicted at the beginning when we started. There’s always smaller things along the way, like, could you’ve done something faster? But I don’t think those decisions forestall this conclusion.”
Other companies have also shuttered AV operations.
Close to a decade ago, Cupertino-based Apple had the vision of developing a fully autonomous electric vehicle that would feature voice-guided navigations and have a limousine-like interior feel. Apple had planned to bring the so-called Project Titan project to market come 2028, but “pivoted to a less ambitious design” in January. A month later it shuttered the project.
Separately, General Motors-owned Cruise’s autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco last October. Since that incident, the company recalled its entire fleet of robotaxis, laid off 535 workers in the Bay Area and company CEO Kyle Vogt resigned.
Organizations have cited the need to consider safety concerns associated with autonomous vehicles. Many, like three San Francisco agencies, have said there is a need for conversations and implementation of regulations around AVs due to safety risks.
Despite AV companies getting pushback from organizations and governments across the state, Mountain View-based Wyamo LLC got permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand operations past San Francisco.
Though this followed after California regulators suspended Alphabet Inc-backed Waymo’s request to expand its robotaxi services across the state — which included 22 Bay Area cities and parts of Los Angeles County — pending “further staff review.
A week prior to the decision, Waymo issued a voluntary recall of its software after two of its vehicles crashed into a pickup truck in Phoenix.
Although Ghost Autonomy has shut down operations, Hayes said the experience has been rewarding.
“The thing that was most amazing to me was we built a product … that you can feel,” he said. “The first time of being out on the road, with a vehicle, and just making that continuous improvement over time, it was something that you could feel in your inner ear. That was just the most exciting phase of product development. And it’s not quite the same as looking at a report and seeing that your system ran for 24 hours and didn’t leak memory. It makes a huge impact when you can feel something getting better every day.”
Source: www.bizjournals.com