- DoorDash announced it has acquired an autonomous driving company called Scotty Labs. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.
DoorDash has acquired an autonomous driving company called Scotty Labs. The terms of this deal were undisclosed.
Scotty Labs is a tele-operations company working on technology for enabling users to remotely control self-driving cars, according to TechCrunch. Prior to the acquisition, Scotty Labs raised $6 million in a seed round of funding from Gradient Ventures with participation from Horizon Ventures and Hemi Ventures.
“Our core belief at Scotty has always been that Autonomy + Remote Assistance will be the future of logistics. We have intentionally always considered ourselves to be the anti-hype company and focused intensely on developing core infrastructure and algorithms, with a healthy degree of human intelligence, to ensure the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles,” said Scotty CEO and co-founder Tobenna Arodiogbu in a blog post. “Our team has done bold things, from remotely driving a car around San Francisco to autonomously (level 2) driving a truck at 4am in California.”
Scotty Labs was also founded by CTO Usman Ghani. Ghani was previously at engineer at Microsoft, Platform, and Zenefits. And Arodiogbu was previously a product manager at Opendoor.com and Zenefits.
Doordash did not reveal how it would be using Scotty Labs’ talent and technology. But it is safe to assume that DoorDash is turning its attention to remote-controlled robots for deliveries. DoorDash also has a partnership with GM’s Cruise for testing self-driving vehicle delivery.
