Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on self-driving software for automaker partners, has shut down, according to TechCrunch.
The startup, which had raised nearly $220 million, posted a note on its website that it ended global operations and dissolved the company as of Wednesday. The company employed about 100 people and had operations in Mountain View, Dallas and Sydney.
“We are proud of the significant technical innovations and progress the Ghost team has made in their mission to deliver software-defined consumer autonomy,” reads the note on its website. “The path to long-term profitability was uncertain given the current funding climate and the long-term investments required for autonomy development and commercialization. We are exploring potential long-term destinations for our team’s innovations.”
The termination comes just five months since the startup partnered with OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund to gain early access to OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft. Ghost also received a $5 million investment from OpenAI. The most recent closed a $55 million drop last year which included early investors Keith Rabois at Founders Fund and Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures.
At the time, Ghost co-founder and CEO John Hayes protested the company’s plans to explore the applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs)—artificial intelligence models that can understand text as well as images—in self-driving. He argued that LLMs offered a new way of understanding the “long tail,” adding reasoning to complex scenes where current models fall short. Experts were skeptical of the approach.
Like so many startups trying to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology, Ghost has changed its approach over the years. The startup, as it was originally called Ghost Locomotion, was founded in 2017. The company made its public debut two years later with a total investment of $63.7 million from Rabois of Founders Fund, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures and Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, among others, and a plan to grow a kit that would allow private passenger vehicles to drive autonomously on highways. The company said it will deliver this technology in 2020.
After that deadline came and went, Ghost raised another $100 million in 2021 with a modified plan to focus on crash prevention technology. The Series D funding round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and included Founders Fund and Coatue. Hayes told TechCrunch in 2021 that the startup hadn’t completely closed the door on the consumer kit model, but had turned its attention to universal collision avoidance technology in an effort to get to market faster.
His assumption was that a self-driving system did not need to recognize and categorize objects before avoiding them. Instead, the company tracked the movement of clusters of pixels across a scene. Most other autonomous systems start by recognizing an object and then use image detection to determine size, distance, and other relevant features. This strategy is used because different objects—even those of the same size—can behave differently.
Hayes, reached Wednesday by email, said the company had completed a highway-driving product and was moving into urban environments through what he described as “last-mile delivery.”
“Ultimately, the years required to bring the product to market could not be financed,” he wrote.
