Ghost Autonomy, a startup engaged on autonomous driving software program for automaker companions, has shut down, TechCrunch has discovered.
The startup, which had raised almost $220 million, posted a note on its web site that it ended worldwide operations and wound down the corporate as of Wednesday. The corporate employed about 100 folks and had operations in Mountain View, Dallas and Sydney.
“We are proud of the substantial technical innovations and progress the Ghost team made on its mission to deliver software-defined consumer autonomy,” the observe on its web site reads. “The path to long-term profitability was uncertain given the current funding climate and long-term investment required for autonomy development and commercialization. We are exploring potential long-term destinations for our team’s innovations.”
The shutdown comes simply 5 months because the startup partnered with OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund to achieve early entry to OpenAI methods and Azure assets from Microsoft. Ghost additionally obtained a $5 million funding from OpenAI. It most not too long ago closed a $55 million down round last year that included early buyers Keith Rabois at Founders Fund and Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures.
On the time, Ghost co-founder and CEO John Hayes touted the corporate’s plans to explore the applications of multimodal massive language fashions (LLMs) — AI fashions that may perceive textual content in addition to photos — in self-driving. He argued that LLMs supplied a brand new option to perceive “the long tail,” including reasoning to advanced scenes the place present fashions fall quick. Specialists have been skeptical of the strategy.
Like so many startups attempting to commercialize autonomous automobile know-how, Ghost has shifted its strategy through the years. The startup, initially known as Ghost Locomotion, was based in 2017. The corporate made its public debut two years later with $63.7 million in whole funding from Rabois of Founders Fund, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures and Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, amongst others, and a plan to develop a equipment that might enable privately owned passenger automobiles to drive autonomously on highways. The corporate mentioned it will ship that tech in 2020.
After that deadline got here and went, Ghost raised another $100 million in 2021 with an altered plan to deal with crash prevention tech. The Sequence D funding spherical was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and the inclusion of Founders Fund and Coatue. Hayes advised TechCrunch again in 2021 that the startup hadn’t utterly closed the door on the buyer equipment mannequin however had turned its consideration to common collision avoidance know-how in an effort to get to market sooner.
His premise was that an autonomous driving system didn’t want to acknowledge and categorize objects previous to avoiding them. The corporate was as an alternative monitoring the motion of clusters of pixels in a scene. Most different autonomous methods start by figuring out an object after which use picture localization to find out its measurement, distance and different related options. That technique is used as a result of totally different objects — even these of the identical measurement — can behave otherwise.
Hayes, who was reached Wednesday by way of electronic mail, mentioned the corporate had accomplished a freeway driving product and was transferring in city environments by means of what he described as “last-mile delivery.”
“Ultimately, the years required to bring the product to market could not be financed,” he wrote.
