The road to fully autonomous vehicles on our streets may still be years away, but startups focusing on self-driving technology in closed-campus environments are making headway in building the technology on a smaller scale. Venti Technologies, a startup that focuses on autonomous vehicles for industrial supply chain businesses, has raised $28.8 million in a Series A funding round. The startup plans to use the funds to continue building its software, partner with third parties for hardware, and secure more deals. Venti’s target customer is the range of supply chain businesses that operate across warehouses, ports, and other shipping and logistics environments where vehicles, currently driven by humans, are central to operations.
Dr. Heidi Wyle, Venti’s CEO and co-founder, believes that even with the high prices associated with self-driving vehicles, industrial customers will pay up because it will pay off for them in the long term. She says, “If you have a big logistics facility where you run vehicles, the largest cost is human capital: drivers. Our customers are telling us that they expect to save over 50% of their operations costs with self-driving vehicles. Think they will have huge savings.”
Venti is coming at the industrial market after getting its fingers burned a little from its initial ambitions in the consumer market. Founded out of work on robotics and related fields done by co-founder Daneila Rus at MIT, the startup’s early efforts were in areas like SUVs and robo-taxi models. However, the startup discovered that the complexity of the scenarios was ultimately insurmountable.
Wyle believes that the bonus of campus environments is that the spaces in which they operate and the variables at play are both finite and definable, and typically, the whole operation is carried out at much slower speeds, which makes it easier to correct errors when and if they do arise. However, the company is not yet in fully-autonomous mode even in the closed environment.
Venti is not the only one chasing this opportunity. Others in the same space include EasyMile, Outrider, and Aidrivers. LG Technology Ventures, the VC arm of the LG Group, is leading Venti’s latest funding round. Venti is solving real-world problems for large customers in huge markets with technology that has proven safe, mature, and capable of near-term driverless deployment. Anshul Agarwal, MD at LG Technology Ventures, said, “We are impressed not only by the technology, which is more complete and rapidly able to provide value to end customers, but also by the world-class team.”
