Minus Zero, one of India’s first self-driving vehicle startup, has raised a seed round of $1.7 million led by Chiratae Ventures and joined by JITO Angel Network, senior executives from NVIDIA, and Lyft based out of Silicon Valley, among several others.
The funding will be primarily utilised for building extensive autonomous vehicle R&D infrastructure and expanding the team to get the vehicle out on roads. The team is eyeing a public launch of their first autonomous vehicle use-case in late 2022 to early 2023.
The Bengaluru-based startup, founded by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra in 2021 while they were still students, uses a combination of camera-based vision and algorithms.
TCM Sundaram, founder and vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures, said, “Autonomous vehicles are no more a thing of the future and need to become a reality now.”
Reehal, chief executive and tech chief of the startup, said, “ 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 less data inputs. This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, and harsh weather would have otherwise compromised the safety of the vehicle. Safety is and will be our foremost priority.”
