Former Cruise CEO starts another business!

Kyle Vogt, co-founder and former CEO of self-driving car developer Cruise, has launched a new startup: The Bot Company.

“A lot of things are competing for our time — commutes, longer work hours, and the complexity of modern life,” he admitted in his latest LinkedIn post. “Our team has spent years building robots (including self-driving robots) that can give some of that time back to people, and we’re taking this a step further with this company.”

It can be seen that he anchored the mission of The Bot Company on smart home service robots to reduce people's life burden and save more free time.

It is worth mentioning that Paril Jain, former chief technology officer of Tesla, has become the co-founder of The Bot Company. During his 9 years of work experience at Tesla, Jain has been focusing on the development of core technologies such as autonomous driving system planning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning. In the field of artificial intelligence and intelligent robots , he is an experienced and accomplished technical expert.

In addition, Luke Holoubek, an engineer at The Bot Company, once served as an advisor to Cruise’s chief technology officer. The addition of these two core technical personnel has undoubtedly greatly increased the technical reserves of this startup company and will provide strong support for subsequent product development.

Vogt posted on LinkedIn that The Bot Company received $150 million in angel round financing just after its establishment, with investments from many well-known investment institutions and individual investors, which undoubtedly provided sufficient financial support for subsequent development.

This round of financing was led by California-based investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Spark Capital partner Nabeel Hyatt, and angel investors from well-known companies such as SpaceX, Stripe, and Instacart also followed suit.

In October 2023, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing licenses, citing potential risks to the public and the company's "misinterpretation" of the safety performance of its self-driving taxis. Last year, an autonomous vehicle crash caused huge controversy.

Undoubtedly, experience is one of the biggest assets of Vogt and his team. After the failure in the field of driverless cars, they are expected to start again in the new track of home service robots.