Take a drive through San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or headed to a distant warehouse to be charged and cleaned. These dead-end miles — an industry term for miles traveled without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest obstacles between robotaxi companies and profitability.
Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a solution: automated parking lot-sized pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for the robotaxi industry. And the idea has caught the attention of investors.
Aseon Laboratories has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, according to TechCrunch. Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture capital firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures and Founders Capital also participated, along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, Zimride team co-founders Rajat and Rajat. Turo and Revolut.
Aseon Labs is still in its early stages. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-member robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.
“To achieve economic parity with ride-hailing — which we need to reach with self-driving cars — and to stop actually subsidizing the cost, we need to increase usage,” Calligeros told TechCrunch. “You need the robotaxi in continuous operation throughout the day’s demand curve.”
Aseon’s goal is that a network of distributed autonomous pods will reduce dead-end miles and inevitably turn robotaxi services into profitable businesses.
Calligeros and co-founder and COO Dan Keene come from outside the world of autonomous vehicles. But they bring experience in growing and scaling an equipment and real estate company. Calligeros worked as a mechanical designer at Bentley Motors and Tesla before he and Keene founded Pushme in 2016 to build battery-swapping infrastructure for micromobility fleets. Pushme was building a battery sharing network in Europe when it was acquired in January 2020 by Tier Mobility.
“The parallel I’ll draw is that we were basically tasked by SoftBank to bring it to as many markets as it made sense for Tier in a very short and compressed time frame,” Calligeros said. “The playbook is done, how do we sprinkle sites throughout the city center where it makes sense, but at the same time, facilitate development as non-permanent infrastructure?”
Aseon Labs is applying the same thinking to autonomous vehicles.
As they researched the industry, the pair visited AV warehouses, where fleets of robotaxis are inspected, maintained, cleaned and charged. Real estate costs often push companies to locate these warehouses outside the city center, where most of the transportation activity takes place.
“Warehouse infrastructure is the key requirement for starting a new city for any AV operator,” he said. “And what’s happening in the warehouse right now — the operational backbone of autonomy, really — it’s not over.”
The founders were on board with the idea of creating smaller, independently powered self-contained pods that could be dispersed across a city, but more importantly, could also be moved as needed. The units, which include cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interiors, are considered temporary structures. This classification helps Aseon Labs avoid a lengthy licensing process and allows the company to relocate units if a site is underperforming.
The units are designed to run on a propane generator or other mobile power sources, or can be connected to an existing power source through partnerships with EV charging companies. They are intended to operate autonomously, although early versions will be staffed, according to Calligero.
Aseon Labs also doesn’t try to address every edge case. Instead, it relies on computer vision and artificial intelligence — specific vision language action models common in modern robotics — to detect problems that the pod shouldn’t be trying to solve. For example, if a camera detects melted chocolate on a back seat, the robotic arm rises, as trying to clean it up could make the stain worse. Instead, the vehicle will be loaded and shipped directly to the company’s central warehouse to be handled by a human.
Aseon Labs has not signed contracts with any robotaxi companies yet, but Calligeros said there is widespread interest in the concept. “Almost everyone wants to try it,” he said.
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