Our Investment in Aurora — A Safe Path to Scale Autonomous Vehicles
By Reid Hoffman
Autonomous vehicles promise to address one of the most challenging, important and interesting evolutions of our time: the complete transformation of the way people and goods move. I have been thinking about the development and deployment of autonomous driving technology for years now. In 2015, I published a post on the future of autonomous cars, “Driving in the Networked Age”. In that post, I said that in a world where all vehicles are networked and autonomous, every car on the road will benefit from what every other car has learned. Driving will become a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge. Driving will thus become safer and highly collaborative, with greater cooperation leading to greater efficiency.
Because the size of the prize and the potential for impact is so massive, some of the most innovative large technology companies have dedicated enormous resources to tackle autonomy. A few years ago, I met Chris Urmson after he had founded and while he was leading Google’s self-driving program, now known as Waymo. We were introduced by a mutual friend because of our shared interests in building world-changing technology while remaining deeply attuned to the human impact.
We met at Buck’s in Woodside, and during that first meeting, it was clear that Chris was an exceptional technologist and thinker. We talked about a range of topics including fostering and maintaining a strong company culture as you go through management transitions and how to fuel the right priorities during periods of hyper growth.
Of course, we also talked at length about the present state and potential future of autonomous vehicles. Chris shared his perspective on the path forward; though we are still in the early days, the AV industry has seen an emergence of strong use cases of how autonomous technology can help society, including autonomous delivery of goods and connected devices to help humans drive better. Even if every factory in the U.S. started producing only autonomous vehicles in 2018, it would still take at least 15 years or so to build enough cars to replace all the cars that are currently on the road. We are still at least two decades away from replacing all cars with autonomous vehicles. Because of this, the industry will become a blended, hybrid environment where autonomous technology is built and deployed in collaboration with car manufacturers. The hybrid environment will be the pave the road for making self driving cars a reality.
I continued to stay connected to Chris, and our conversations later focused on Chris’ entrepreneurial passions and what he wanted to do next. He had a few different ideas; one was founding Aurora. I told him at that moment that when the timing was right, I would love to invest and help the company grow. That time is now, and I’m excited to announce Greylock has co-led the series A in Aurora Innovation and I will joining the board. The round was co-led by my long time friend, Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the board.
Chris is Aurora’s CEO and he is joined by his co-founders, CTO Drew Bagnell and CPO Sterling Anderson. This team is easily one of the most experienced and technically renowned in autonomous vehicles, and in my opinion, a pioneering team who will bring autonomous vehicles to the mass market. Based on background alone, Chris could be considered as the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles. Drew has run a research lab at Carnegie Mellon focused on the intersection of ML and robotics for over a decade and led perception and overall autonomy architecture for Uber’s self driving vehicle efforts. And Sterling led Tesla’s Model X program to its launch in 2015, then led the team that delivered Autopilot. Between these three co-founders, they have been thinking and working collectively in robotics, automation and automotive products for over 40 years.
In the world of AV, there will be massive engineering and product challenges that haven’t been solved before. Companies need an extremely experienced, technically strong team coupled with the right business model to build an enduring business. The Aurora team is taking their collective experience, with a focus on rigorous engineering and applied machine learning breakthroughs, to build a completely new approach to autonomous vehicle technology that can have a huge impact on the world, while doing so quickly and safely.
Their approach has partnership built into the core. Aurora wants to work with companies at all stages of development and maturity to help make self-driving a practical reality. Technology companies are going to need immense capital to build cars from scratch, and automotive manufacturers will need to outsource talent to compete against ride-hailing services and technology companies. Aurora’s mission is to deliver self-driving technology to all automotive manufacturers, not just one. Their current approach is to develop and supply a full stack self driving software system to OEMs, from perception and forecasting to motion-planning and map schema. In just a year since its founding, the company has established partnerships with Volkswagen Group, Hyundai Motors, and Byton, the new China-based maker of smart, electric vehicles.
At Greylock, we invest in companies in the earliest stages when we believe they can quickly scale and have a true potential to fundamentally change an industry. The firm has invested in today’s most innovative companies in transportation and autonomy, and we are excited to add Aurora to the portfolio.
