Minus Zero, an autonomous-vehicle startup, has raised $1.7 million in funding led by Chiratae Ventures, along with participation from JITO Angel Network and senior executives from tech companies like Nvidia and Lyft.

With this deal, Minus Zero has become the first self-driving car startup to attract venture capital funds.

As per the startup, the raised funds will be primarily utilized for building extensive autonomous vehicle research and development, infrastructure and hiring more people. The startup is eyeing a public launch of its first autonomous vehicle use-case by late 2022 to early 2023.

Minus Zero | Building Fully Self-Driving Cars In India

Started by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero is building affordable, fully autonomous vehicles in the country. The startup claims to be building an affordable technology for self-driving, which is known to use high end, high definition cameras, extensive data collection and sensors like LIDAR (light detecting and ranging).

Speaking about the development, Gagandeep Reehal, CEO & CTO of Minus Zero, said,

“With multiple patents in the pipeline, our proprietary approach towards self-driving mimics human intuition giving the software an ability to gain confident insights even with lesser data inputs. This enables robust decision making, which is crucial for safe navigation in scenarios where extrinsic factors like poor traffic infrastructure, rash driving, harsh weather, etc., would have otherwise compromised with the safety of the vehicle.”

As per the startup, the complexity of self-driving cars can be solved not by stacking up more sensors or petabytes of data but by making the AI more intuitive, similar to the way our own brain handles decision making.

TCM Sundaram, founder & vice chairman of Chiratae Ventures, stated that scaling autonomous vehicles adoption beyond the current limited usage in specific cities and high-end cars requires a reimagination beyond relying on expensive technologies like Lidar and training over millions of hours of data.

As per TCM Sundaram, the Minus Zero team brings a fresh approach to AV and builds for mass adoption in entry and mid-level cars and emerging markets.

[Read: Top 5 Government Schemes For Startups And MSMEs In India]

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