A new crop of early-stage startups \u2014 along with some recent VC investments \u2014 illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two recent entrants \u2014 Seattle-based Overland AI<\/a> and New Brunswick-based Potential<\/a> \u2014 are poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy.\u00a0<\/p>\n While these startups are applying their tech in different ways, Overland AI and Potential do share some common off-road ground. Founders of each startup believe they\u2019ve cracked the code to one of the more challenging applications of automated driving by building software that doesn\u2019t rely on some of the main crutches of testing and deployment \u2014 such as detailed maps, large swaths of training data and the ability to fall back on remote assistance.\u00a0<\/p>\n The U.S. Department of Defense and venture capital investors are taking notice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overland AI, which is developing a self-driving system designed for military operations like reconnaissance, surveillance and delivering electronic warfare packages, was awarded in April up to $18.6 million<\/a> from the U.S. Army\u2019s Defense Innovation Unit. The funds will be used to build a prototype autonomous software stack for its Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program over the next two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n The startup, which was founded in 2022, raised this week a $10 million seed round led by Point72 Ventures. The funds will be used to expand Overland\u2019s team and continue developing OverDrive, the company\u2019s autonomy stack, according to CEO and founder Byron Boots.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Potential, which is making advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that allows ATVs, underground mining vehicles and passenger cars to handle off-road environments, has raised a $2 million CAD (~$1.5 million USD) extension to its seed round led by Brightspark Ventures, a Canadian early-stage VC. That brings Potential\u2019s total funding to $8.5 million CAD (~$6.2 million USD). The startup has spent the last six years developing its technology and is now doing several pilot projects across power sports, motorcycles and automotive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Potential and Overland AI aren\u2019t the only companies trying to apply autonomous vehicle technology to areas outside of public streets. The high-cost pursuit of commercial robotaxi and self-driving truck operations has thwarted dozens of startups over the past several years. As those shut down, a new batch of startups such as Polymath Robotics, Forterra, Pronto.ai, Bear Robotics and Outrider have emerged with more grounded ambitions: applying AV tech to warehouses, mining, industrial and off-road environments.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are absolutely deploying capital in off-road autonomy,\u201d\u00a0Alexei Andreev, managing director at Autotech Ventures, told TechCrunch. \u201cActually, if anything, we are staying away from highway autonomy and completely doubled down on off-road autonomy.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of the off-road companies that Autotech Ventures is investing in today are in the agricultural and construction sectors \u2014 products like autonomous mining vehicles, forklifts and tractors. Andreev says for these sectors, it\u2019s about addressing the labor shortage while increasing productivity and making farms and construction areas safer.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd if you remove people, you immediately get a reduction in your insurance premiums. So the ROI for those vertical applications is now and it\u2019s significant,\u201d said Andreev.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another upshot: Off-road autonomy has found a friend in defense.\u00a0<\/p>\n When it comes to automating off-road driving, the U.S. Army can be a great customer. After all, autonomous vehicles started as a DARPA project, says Jeff Peters, a partner at Ibex Investors. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is a U.S. Department of Defense agency focused on advancing technology for military use.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe hype around AV moved a lot of the industry toward bigger potential commercial applications, but DoD projects have persisted,\u201d Peters told TechCrunch over email, noting that autonomous mining startup SafeAI and autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics<\/a> have also pursued defense grants. \u201cI think AV companies (those still around) will chase DoD projects because it offers large, non-dilutive funding in the interim prior to commercial operations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Overland AI is the latest byproduct of the DARPA program. Boots, a professor of machine learning at the University of Washington and founder of the Robot Learning Laboratory at the university\u2019s school of computer science and engineering, has a long history of collaborating with the U.S. Army Research Lab and DARPA.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overland was spun out from Boots\u2019 research and team involved in DARPA\u2019s RACER (Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency) program, the goal of which is to develop self-driving vehicles that can handle tough terrain.\u00a0<\/p>\n The program is still ongoing. Overland, which is stacked with deep tech veterans from Google, Nvidia, Apple, Waymo, Aurora, Embark and Argo as well as software engineers who\u2019ve worked on mission-critical solutions at SpaceX, RTX and the U.S. Army, was recently selected to continue on to the second phase.<\/p>\n \u201cThe high-level idea is that currently just about every ground vehicle that the military uses has a person inside of it,\u201d Boots told TechCrunch in a video interview. \u201cAnd you can imagine if you can just pull the person out of the vehicle, that confers safety and tactical advantages.\u201d<\/p>\n To pull the person out means vehicles must autonomously navigate complex off-road terrain using only onboard sensors (mainly cameras, according to Boots) and compute, without relying on maps, GPS or remote human operators. That means Overland\u2019s software has to understand the geometry of the ground \u2014 including things like vegetation and mud \u2014 every step of the way, and how that affects vehicle dynamics.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe terrain gets a vote on how the vehicle moves,\u201d said Boots.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overland\u2019s tech \u201cbasically takes in the sensor data and builds a terrain representation as it goes,\u201d Boots explained. Then the vehicle uses that digital representation \u201cplus the goal that it\u2019s trying to get to, which could be several kilometers away, to try to find a route through the terrain towards that goal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPart of the benefit of having an autonomous system is that when the system is tasked, if you lose a communication link to that ground vehicle, it will continue to move towards its goal and try to complete the task until the communication link is reestablished,\u201d said Boots.\u00a0<\/p>\nOff-road opportunity<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Overland AI: From DARPA to seed funding<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"ATV](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Potential-P0-test-vehicle-2.jpg?w=680\")