OpenAI-Backed Self-Driving Startup Ghost Autonomy Shuts Down
From layoffs to saying no to EVs, the startup world is taking thousands of turns, and this time Ghost Autonomy, a self-driving car startup backed by OpenAI, has shut down saying they can't make the product go into the market.
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| Photo from Ghost Autonomy |
Being founded in 2017 and after raising nearly $220 million in funding Ghost Autonomy cited the difficulty of achieving profitability in the autonomous vehicle space and the high investment required for development and commercialization as some solid reasons for their shutdown.
With this, over 100 people will go jobless as the company updated a note on the official website saying they are stopping their worldwide operations:
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| Ghost Autonomy website screenshot |
Ghost Autonomy has shut down worldwide operations and wound down the company as of April 3, 2024.
The company was operating from Mountain View, Dallas, and Sydney, and suddenly announced the shutdown even after getting funding from OpenAI which is currently the hottest startup in the tech world. On November 08, 2023, Ghost Autonomy announced a $5 million funding coming from OpenAI to accelerate their LLM-based complex scene understanding taking the total funding to a whopping $220 million.
It sounds like out of the air, but Ghost Autonomy was trying hard to bring its product to the market and failed miserably from developing a consumer self-driving car kit to collision avoidance technology.
Ghost Autonomy Investors List:
Besides other unknown investments, here we have some official names:
- Founders Fund: Keith Rabois.
- Sutter Hill Ventures: Mike Speiser. They participated in multiple funding rounds.
- OpenAI Startup Fund: Invested $5 million and provided access to OpenAI systems and Microsoft's Azure resources.
- Coatue Management: Participated in the Series D funding round (investor name not provided).
- Khosla Ventures: Invested in the initial $63.7 million funding round (investor name not provided).
Ghost Autonomy's approach to self-driving cars relied on tracking clusters of pixels instead of identifying objects and according to the company, it was the best option for making an autonomous vehicle, however, it was met with skepticism by some experts in the EV and Autonomous Vehicle industry.
To your notes: The shutdown of Ghost Autonomy comes at a time when many self-driving car startups such as Phantom Auto, Argo AI, and many others are facing challenges and finally saying goodbye to their dreams.
According to a recent article in Forbes (currently not available on the website): the self-driving car industry is facing several challenges, including technical hurdles, regulatory uncertainty, and public skepticism.
These challenges have led to a number of high-profile self-driving car startups shutting down in recent years and the most in 2024.
