- Ghost Locomotion announced it has raised $63.7 million in funding to build aftermarket self-driving kits for popular car models
Ghost Locomotion — a startup that is led by former Yahoo CTO and Pure Storage co-founder John Hayes — announced it has raised $63.7 million in capital to date from Founders Fund’s Keith Rabois, Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla, and Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser, according to VentureBeat. Ghost recently emerged from stealth mode after two years of developing an aftermarket self-driving kit to retrofit existing cars. During that time, it saw promising compatibility with 20 “popular” car models from 2012 onward. The company is expecting to roll out its product launches next year.
“Many self-driving companies are attempting to solve the driving experience from end to end and have not yet perfected any element of as a result,” said Ghost in a press release. “Ghost is simplifying the problem by focusing on exit-to-exit driving, to start. As complexity of city driving pushes self-driving timelines further and further into the future, Ghost is laser-focused on building real self-driving for highways and providing a huge benefit to people sooner, and expanding from there.”
Hayes and Ghost co-founder Dr. Volkmar Uhlig told VentureBeat that the company’s differentiation is based on its approach to automation — which utilizes imitation learning. Compared to the advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and Tesla’s implementation of Autopilot, Ghost’s technology starts with human observation, recording what real-world drivers see, and how it reacts to create a ground truth. Plus the company’s artificial intelligence uses this to model correct driving behaviors thus creating a dynamic autonomous control policy that scales to almost any modern car.
Ghost has a set of real-world data samples that are not used to train the model — which it uses for testing and constantly adds more scenarios and retrains the model. Ghost’s kits are installed on the cars of dozens of commuters along with a collection of Lyft and Uber drivers. Plus Ghost plans to have its kits in hundreds of cars by the end of the year and thousands of cars in 2020.
And Ghost’s aftermarket kit will have a small computer that is installed in the car’s trunk and connected to the controller area network (CAN) along with 8 low-profile cameras that get placed on a car’s windshield, side windows, and rear window.
Ghost has over 75 employees who are mostly data scientists and engineers. And its team of executives include former Uber senior manager David Purdy, former Uber general manager Jay Gierak, and former Cloudera executive Justin Erickson. And Ghost’s board of directors includes Sila Nanotechnologies co-founder Gene Berdichevsky.
