Self-driving vehicle start-up Minus Zero raises $1.7mn in seed fund

The company plans the public launch of its first Autonomous vehicle use-case in late 2022 to early 2023.

Minus Zero, the self-driving vehicle start-up, has raised $1.7 million in a seed round led by Chiratae Ventures and clocking participation from JITO Angel Network.

Angel investors from the autonomous vehicles industry, including senior executives from NVIDIA & Lyft based out of Silicon Valley, participated in the round. The company said it will use the funding for building an autonomous vehicle R&D infrastructure and expanding its team.

“Autonomous vehicles (AV) are no more a thing of the future and need to become a reality now. Scaling AV adoption beyond the current limited usage in specific cities and high-end cars, requires a reimagination beyond relying on expensive technologies like Lidar and training over millions of hours of data,” said TCM Sundaram, founder and vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures.

The company plans the public launch of its first AV use-case in late 2022 to early 2023, potentially making it one of the first to get a product out in the market.

From what started merely as a research paper a few years back, Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra founded Minus Zero in 2021. In terms of technology Minus Zero relies solely on a monocular camera for sensing and using compute much less than what one might use to play modern computer games.

Gagandeep Reehal, CEO & CTO said, “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 lesser data inputs. This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, harsh weather, etc. would have otherwise compromised with the safety of the vehicle. Safety is and will be our foremost priority.”