
George Hotz wants to make any car autonomous.
The software designer’s startup, called Comma.ai, was funded on Monday with a $3.1 million investment from venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. The hook? It offers a $1,000 kit that might be able to turn any car into a semi-autonomous vehicle. Hotz plans to sell the kits, which include computer vision software and several cameras, at some point in 2016.
Hotz’s career followed the quintessential startup story. After attending Rochester Institute of Technology for one semester, he dropped out. Internships at Google and Facebook lead him to a position with artificial intelligence research company Vicarious, but he left that too, most interested in pursuing self-driving technology he could pitch to companies like Tesla and General Motors.
Adding the self-driving kit to a car could be “on par with setting up a piece of IKEA furniture” if the plan works, Hotz said.
So far, Comma.ai has four employees and is looking for more. A 2016 Acura ILX equipped with their technology package has travelled one hour on its own, from Mountain View to San Francisco, and Hotz seems confident that he can thrive in the self-driving car space.
“I started to look around at the other players. These people are nubes,” he was quoted as saying.
Comma.AI is hiring programmers. Among the pared-down blog posts on their site is also the plan to enter a car in an Autocross competition, using “an insane vehicle dynamics model.”
(Via Channel3000.)