- Helm.ai recently announced it raised $13 million in seed funding. These are the details.
Helm.ai recently announced it raised $13 million in seed funding, according to TechCrunch. The funding was provided by A.Capital Ventures, Amplo, Binnacle Partners, Sound Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, and SV Angel.
And over a dozen angel investors also participated, including Berggruen Holdings founder Nicolas Berggruen, Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, NBA player Kevin Durant, Gen. David Petraeus, Matician co-founder and CEO Navneet Dalal, Quiet Capital managing partner Lee Linden, and Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev.
The company was founded by Vlad Voroninski and Tudor Achim with a goal of removing the bottlenecks involved in developing autonomous vehicle technology. Along with the funding announcement, Helm.ai also came out of stealth mode.
Helm.ai plans to use the funding for advancing engineering and R&D. And the company is also hiring more employees along with locking in and fulfilling deals with customers.
Helm.ai is just working on the software end of driverless cars. The company is building software that understands sensor data just as well as humans do.
Rather than depending on a combination of simulation and on-road testing for training, Helm.ai is able to skip some steps. Its software can train neural networks without tapping into large-scale fleet data.
“There’s this very long tail end and an endless sea of corner cases to go through when developing AI software for autonomous vehicles,” said Voroninski via TechCrunch. “What really matters is the unit of efficiency of how much does it cost to solve any given corner case, and how quickly can you do it? And so that’s the part that we really innovated on.”
Voroninski first started working on autonomous driving at UCLA where he learned about the technology from his undergraduate adviser — who worked on the DARPA Grand Challenge. Later he worked on applied mathematics for the next decade and earned a PhD in math at UC Berkeley. Later, he joined the faculty at the MIT math department.
In November 2016, Voroninski left MIT and Sift Security to launch Helm.ai with Achim. Now Helm.ai has around 15 employees and the company is planning to license its software for two use cases: Level 2+ and Level 4 fleets. The company has several customers, but they have been undisclosed.
