Funding Alert

Self-driving startup Minus Zero raises $1.7 M in funding led by Chiratae Ventures

• ByStartupStory     |    May 23, 2022

Minus Zero, India’s first start-up building fully autonomous vehicles, has raised a seed round of $1.7 million led by Chiratae Ventures and joined by JITO Angel Network and senior executives from tech -savvy like Nvidia and Lyft.

Minus Zero, co-founded by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, stress on building a technology proficient both in rural and urban localities. “We want the public to be able to ride in autonomous vehicles like they do in conventional cabs today,” says Reehal. It claims to be safer, reliable and affordable, busting the doubts of this technology.

This Indian company is the first to allure funds from venture capital funds. These collected capital will be directed primarily in utilizing an extensive autonomous vehicle research and development, infrastructure like high resolution camera and LIDAR like sensors. It will also focus on hiring extra employees. The team is planning for a public launch of their first autonomous vehicle use-case by the year end or early 2023.

The self- driving technology led by Tesla and Google is considered to be the future for countries like India where terrains and traffic vary every kilometer but breaking the conception Sundaram, founder and vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures, said, “Autonomous vehicles are no more a thing of the future and need to become a reality now.”

Reehal the chief executive and tech chief of the startup addressing the safety concerns said that “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 less data inputs. This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, and harsh weather would have otherwise compromised the safety of the vehicle. Safety is and will be our foremost priority.”

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