India's First Affordable Self-Driving Car Startup Minus Zero Raises $1.7 Million In Funding

India¡¯s first startup that is building affordable and fully self-driving cars, Minus Zero, has said that it has raised $1.7 million in its recent funding round, as per an ET report.

The company claims that its cars are capable of fully driverless manoeuvres in the world's toughest unstructured and disorganized traffic scenarios, powered by proprietary nature-inspired AI that is less dependent on extensive data and costly sensor suites (like LIDAR's, etc.).

The funding was led by Chiratae Ventures, along with participation from JITO Angel Network and senior executives from tech companies like Nvidia, and Lyft. The deal marks the first time an Indian self-driving car company is attracting venture capital funds.

This funding will primarily be utilized for building extensive autonomous vehicle research and development, infrastructure and hiring more people. The team is eyeing a public launch of their first autonomous vehicle use-case by late 2022 to early 2023.

The carmaker Minus Zero reportedly claims to be building an affordable technology for self-driving, which is known to use high end, high definition cameras, extensive data collection and sensors like LIDAR (light detecting and ranging).

It said in a statement ¡°Minus Zero believes that the complexity of self-driving cars can be solved not by stacking up more sensors or petabytes of data, but by making the AI more intuitive, similar to the way our own brain handles decision making,¡± as per ET report.

Minus Zero¡¯s CEO & CTO Gagandeep Reehal 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 lesser data inputs. This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, harsh weather, etc. would have otherwise compromised with the safety of the vehicle.¡±

Minus Zero

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Investor¡¯s Statement

Autonomous vehicles (AV) are no more a thing of the future and need to become a reality now. Scaling AV adoption beyond the current limited usage in specific cities and high-end cars, requires a reimagination beyond relying on expensive technologies like Lidar and training over millions of hours of data,¡± said TCM Sundaram, founder & vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures, who invested in the startup, as per ET report.

¡°Further, in emerging markets like India with difficult and unstructured driving conditions, the approach to AV needs to be novel and specifically tailored. The Minus Zero team brings a fresh approach to AV and build for mass adoption in entry and mid-level cars and emerging markets,¡± he said.

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