Stealth startup rideOS, a technology platform designed to accelerate the safe, global roll-out of self-driving vehicles, emerged this week, announcing a series of activities intended to propel the venture forward. Started in 2017 the company’s recent efforts have yielded: a $9 million in Series A funding led by. Sequoia Capital with participation from Graph Ventures and SV Angel, Sequoia Partner Mike Vernal joining rideOS’s board of directors, and a partnership with Ford-owned Autonomic.
“We’re building the next generation air traffic control system for ground transport to help ride-hailing companies, OEMs, mobility startups, and governments bring fleets of self-driving vehicles to the world safely,” said rideOS CEO and co-founder Justin Ho in a press statement.
Co-founder Ho was formerly the Head of Strategy for Uber’s ATD and fellow co-founder CTO Chris Blumenberg served as Head of Map Services at Uber. Prior to Uber, Ho was as an investor with Citadel Investment Group and Goldman Sachs and Blumenberg was a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple. In addition, the co-founders have put together a team of industry experts who have led product teams in the mapping and navigation spaces. They are further bolstering the venture’s talent depth by creating partnerships with leading self-driving vehicle businesses such as Autonomic.
RideOS is a platform-agnostic distributor of critical information across fleets that will help bring self-driving vehicles to market in a safe way. Its products and services are intended to be building blocks for developing on-demand self-driving services. Operating in real-time through the cloud, rideOS delivers autonomous vehicle routing, estimated time of arrival (ETA) calculations, dispatch, supply positioning, multi-rider trip planning, and fleet management dashboards.
“There are dozens of teams focused on bringing a single self-driving car to market. rideOS is focused on what happens next — what you need to enable a fleet of self-driving vehicles. Their technology has a true network effect — every car that plugs into their network makes every other rideOS car safer and more efficient,” said Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia and rideOS board member.
RideOS focuses on a range of safety issues such as traffic conditions, accidents, harsh weather, construction zones, and potholes. The platform will accurately and immediately communicate critical information to every vehicle operating in the area.
In combination with Autonomic’s Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC), rideOS can offer routing and marketplace services to Autonomic’s OEM customers, like Ford, but not limited to them. TMC serves both developers and automakers to connect diverse components of urban mobility systems such as vehicles, mass transit, pedestrians, city infrastructure, and service providers. The partnership will allow both companies to build robust platforms that will yield unique experiences atop connected vehicles, while furthering the safe rollout of connected vehicle technology.
Founded in 2016, the Autonomic team is drawn from companies like Xtreme Labs, acquired by Pivotal, and Amazon. Now it is partnering with RideOS with a team founded just last year drawn from Uber and Apple, and other key players in the autonomous vehicle industry.
