Voyage
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Holy Grail raises $2.7M seed fund to create modular carbon capture devices
The founders of Holy Grail, a two-year-old startup based in Mountain View, California, are taking a micro approach to solving the outsized problem of capturing carbon.
The startup is prototyping a direct air carbon capture device that is modular and small — a departure from the dozens of projects in the U.S. and abroad that aim to capture CO2 from large, centralized emitters, like power plants or industrial facilities. Holy Grail co-founder Nuno Pereira told TechCrunch that this approach will reduce costs and eliminate the need for permits or project financing.
While Holy Grail has a long development and testing phase ahead, the idea has captured the attention and capital from well-known investors and Silicon Valley founders. Holy Grail recently raised $2.7 million in seed funding from LowerCarbon Capital, Goat Capital, Stripe founder Patrick Collison, Charlie Songhurst, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, Songkick co-founder Ian Hogarth, Starlight Ventures and 35 Ventures. Existing investors Deep Science Ventures, Y Combinator and Oliver Cameron, who co-founded Voyage, the autonomous vehicle acquired by Cruise, also participated.
The carbon capture device is still in the prototype stage, Pereira said, with many specifics — such as the anticipated size of the end product and how long it will likely function — still to be worked out. Cost-effectively separating CO2 from the air is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The company is in the process of filing patents for the technology, so he declined to be too specific about many characteristics of the device, including what it will be made out of. But he did stress that the company is taking a fundamentally different technical approach to carbon capture.
“The current technologies, they are very complex. They are basically either [using] temperature or pressure [to capture carbon],” he said. “There is a lot of things that go into it, compressors, calciners and all these things,” referring to additional parts like mechanical pumps, cryogenic air separators and large quantities of water and energy. Pereira said the company will instead use electricity to control a chemical reaction that binds to the CO2. He added that Holy Grail’s devices are not dependent on scale to achieve cost reductions, either. And they will be modular, so they can be stacked or configured depending on a customer’s requirements.
The scrubbers, as Pereira calls them, will focus on raw capture of CO2 rather than conversion (converting the CO2 into fuels, for example). Pereira instead explained — with a heavy caveat that much about the end product still needs to be figured out — that once a Holy Grail unit is full, it could be collected by the company, though where the carbon will end up is still an open question.
The company will start by selling carbon credits, using its devices as the carbon reducing project. The end goal is selling the scrubbers to commercial customers and eventually even individual consumers. That’s right: Holy Grail wants you to have your own carbon capture device, possibly even right in your backyard. But the company still likely has a long road ahead of it.
“We’re essentially shifting the scaling factor from building a very large mega-ton plant and having the project management and all that stuff to building scrubbers in an assembly line, like a consumer product to be manufactured.”
Pereira said many approaches will be needed to tackle the mammoth problem of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. “The problem is just too big,” he said.
The story has been updated to reflect that Holy Grail is based in Mountain View, not Cupertino.
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Driverless vehicles in the age of the novel coronavirus
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to different outcomes for different businesses. While some have stood to benefit (think Zoom, Facebook and bidet startup Tushy), others have been hit hard and laid off employees in order to survive. But there are some that fall somewhere in the middle. Autonomous driving startup Voyage believes it is not explicitly benefiting, but it’s not at risk of going under either, says CEO Oliver Cameron.
Cameron’s response to the pandemic centers around three areas: passenger operations, technology and company-building. While operations have halted, Voyage is moving forward with its technology and has shifted the company to a 100% remote-work environment. With a post-pandemic world in mind, Cameron envisions more demand for autonomous vehicles.
Before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Voyage had already paused its consumer operations, which primarily serve seniors in retirement communities.
“We did that because, obviously, seniors are disproportionately impacted by this and it would be horrific for Voyage to be patient zero in the retirement community and this is something we were operating out of an abundance of caution,” says Cameron. “So we paused our operations from a consumer service perspective very early and we won’t open those up for quite some time. It’s tough to say at what particular point because it seems like the consensus is it will be a progressive opening up of the economy, meaning some populations will be fine to go back to work and there will be some that are significantly impacted, like seniors, that are effectively locked down for an extended period of time. So we’re not in a rush to get that back up and running until we hear from the community itself that it’s OK to do that.”
Despite the hiatus in operations, Voyage is still running simulations and using a variety of automated testing tools to determine if it is making progress. For example, Voyage uses automation to test for regressions in perception. A challenge in perception is false positives and false negatives — that is, seeing something that isn’t there or not seeing something that is there, Cameron explains.
“And we have this pretty cool tool that enables us to monitor with each perception release if we are seeing regressions based on perception performance in the past,” he says. “We don’t need to be there in the real world to see that. We can just tell instantaneously if that is the case.”
Voyage also has a way of testing different permutations of environments to see how its planning and prediction software can handle different scenarios. Then, of course, it uses more traditional simulation tools provided by Applied Intuition.
“But we don’t fool ourselves into thinking that simulation or automated testing makes up for all that real-world testing brought to the table,” Cameron says. “It doesn’t, and there’s definitely going to be some time that we have to spend once we do get back on the road, fixing issues that we just couldn’t find as a result of not being on the road.”
From a company and personnel standpoint, Voyage has also transitioned into a remote-working company. It hasn’t been a distraction, according to Cameron, since Voyage embraced remote work some time ago.
“We’re lucky that we are able to weather the storm,” Cameron says. “We’ve got a good chunk of cash in the bank and, luckily, we raised at a reasonable time — at the end of last year — so we’re going to be fine.”
Many companies in the tech ecosystem have been forced to lay off employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Voyage, however, will seemingly not be one of them. As Cameron noted, Voyage raised a $31 million round in September.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about great companies will weather this and the companies that were going to die anyway will die. I’m sure there is some truth to that, but some of it is just luck. Some of it is that you raised at a time you didn’t know was important, but turned out to be quite important. And, you know, our burn has always been low compared to others in the space. For us, we’ve always been frugal, and it turns out that’s quite important in a pandemic.”
Despite Voyage’s use of simulation, its automated testing and healthy bank account, the pandemic is still a major complication.
“I think it’s got to set everyone back,” Cameron says. “I think there is a spectrum and there are companies that stand to benefit from this. We’ve seen with Zoom they stand to benefit from this. Remote working tools, they stand to benefit from this. And then you go all the other way to the end of the spectrum — those that are actively impacted like airlines, ridesharing, scooters and I believe we’re somewhere in the middle. The reason we’re in the middle is because in a post-virus world, I’m pretty sure behaviors change. It’s TBD on how long those behaviors last, but it’s clear that behaviors are going to change.”
In that world where behaviors change, Cameron bets that driverless cars will add more value than traditional ride-hailing services. In a world where people may still be hesitant to get into a car with strangers, a driverless car would mitigate those fears, he says.
“In the short term, everyone’s impacted,” he says. “There’s a slowdown in everything. In the medium and long term, we’ll be fine because I believe the demand is still there for driverless vehicles and even more so for those disproportionately impacted.”
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Voyage raises $31 million to bring driverless taxis to communities
Voyage, the autonomous vehicle startup that spun out of Udacity, announced Thursday it has raised $31 million in a round led by Franklin Templeton.
Khosla Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company, which operates a ride-hailing service in retirement communities using self-driving cars supported by human safety drivers, has raised a total of $52 million since launching in 2017. The new funding includes a $3 million convertible note.
Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron has big plans for the fresh injection of capital, including hiring and expanding its fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, which always have a human safety driver behind the wheel.
Ultimately, the expanded G2 fleet and staff are just the means toward Cameron’s grander mission to turn Voyage into a truly driverless and profitable ride-hailing company.
“It’s not just about solving self-driving technology,” Cameron told TechCrunch in a recent interview, explaining that a cost-effective vehicle designed to be driverless is the essential piece required to make this a profitable business.
The company is in the midst of a hiring campaign that Cameron hopes will take its 55-person staff to more than 150 over the next year. Voyage has had some success attracting high-profile people to fill executive-level positions, including CTO Drew Gray, who previously worked at Uber ATG, Otto, Cruise and Tesla, as well as former NIO and Tesla employee Davide Bacchet as director of autonomy.
Funds will also be used to increase its fleet of second-generation self-driving cars (called G2) that are currently being used in a 4,000-resident retirement community in San Jose, Calif., as well as The Villages, a 40-square-mile, 125,000-resident retirement city in Florida. Voyage’s G2 fleet has 12 vehicles. Cameron didn’t provide details on how many vehicles it will add to its G2 fleet, only describing it as a “nice jump that will allow us to serve consumers.”
Voyage used the G2 vehicles to create a template of sorts for its eventual driverless vehicle. This driverless product — a term Cameron has used in a previous post on Medium — will initially be limited to 25 miles per hour, which is the driving speed within the two retirement communities in which Voyage currently tests and operates. The vehicle might operate at a low speed, but they are capable of handling complex traffic interactions, he wrote.
“It won’t be the most cost-effective vehicle ever made because the industry still is in its infancy, but it will be a huge, huge, huge improvement over our G2 vehicle in terms of being be able to scale out a commercial service and make money on each ride,” Cameron said.
Voyage initially used modified Ford Fusion vehicles to test its autonomous vehicle technology, then introduced in July 2018 Chrysler Pacifica minivans, its second generation of autonomous vehicles. But the end goal has always been a driverless product.
TechCrunch previously reported that the company has partnered with an automaker to provide this next-generation vehicle that has been designed specifically for autonomous driving. Cameron wouldn’t name the automaker. The vehicle will be electric and it won’t be a retrofit like the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid vehicles Voyage currently uses or its first-generation vehicle, a Ford Fusion.
Most importantly, and a detail Cameron did share with TechCrunch, is that the vehicle it uses for its driverless service will have redundancies and safety-critical applications built into it.
Voyage also has deals in place with Enterprise rental cars and Intact insurance company to help it scale.
“You can imagine leasing is much more optimal than purchasing and owning vehicles on your balance sheet,” Cameron said. “We have those deals in place that will allow us to not only get the vehicle costs down, but other aspects of the vehicle into the right place as well.”
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Ethics in the age of autonomous vehicles
Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its inaugural Mobility Sessions event, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles.
Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts of key panels and conversations from the event, such as Megan Rose Dickey‘s chat with Voyage CEO and co-founder Oliver Cameron and Uber’s prediction team lead Clark Haynes on the ethical considerations for autonomous vehicles.
Megan, Oliver and Clark talk through how companies should be thinking about ethics when building out the self-driving ecosystem, while also diving into the technical aspects of actually building an ethical transportation product. The panelists also discuss how their respective organizations handle ethics, representation and access internally, and how their approaches have benefited their offerings.
Clark Haynes: So we as human drivers, we’re naturally what’s called foveate. Our eyes go forward and we have some mirrors that help us get some situational awareness. Self-driving cars don’t have that problem. Self-driving cars are designed with 360-degree sensors. They can see everything around them.
But the interesting problem is not everything around you is important. And so you need to be thinking through what are the things, the people, the actors in the world that you might be interacting with, and then really, really think through possible outcomes there.
I work on the prediction problem of what’s everyone doing? Certainly, you need to know that someone behind you is moving in a certain way in a certain direction. But maybe that thing that you’re not really certain what it is that’s up in front of you, that’s the thing where you need to be rolling out 10, 20 different scenarios of what might happen and make certain that you can kind of hedge your bets against all of those.
For access to the full transcription below and for the opportunity to read through additional event transcripts and recaps, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
Megan Rose Dickey: Ready to talk some ethics?
Oliver Cameron: Born ready.
Clark Haynes: Absolutely.
Rose Dickey: I’m here with Oliver Cameron of Voyage, a self-driving car company that operates in communities, like retirement communities, for example. And with Clark Haynes of Uber, he’s on the prediction team for autonomous vehicles.
So some of you in the audience may remember, it was last October, MIT came out with something called the moral machine. And it essentially laid out 13 different scenarios involving self-driving cars where essentially someone had to die. It was either the old person or the young person, the black person, or the white person, three people versus one person. I’m sure you guys saw that, too.
So why is that not exactly the right way to be thinking about self-driving cars and ethics?
Haynes: This is the often-overused trolley problem of, “You can only do A or B choose one.” The big thing there is that if you’re actually faced with that as the hardest problem that you’re doing right now, you’ve already failed.
You should have been working harder to make certain you never ended up in a situation where you’re just choosing A or B. You should actually have been, a long time ago, looking at A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and like thinking through all possible outcomes as far as what your self-driving car could do, in low probability outcomes that might be happening.
Rose Dickey: Oliver, I remember actually, it was maybe a few months ago, you tweeted something about the trolley problem and how much you hate it.
Cameron: I think it’s one of those questions that doesn’t have an ideal answer today, because no one’s got self-driving cars deployed to tens of thousands of people experiencing these sorts of issues on the road. If we did an experiment, how many people here have ever faced that conundrum? Where they have to choose between a mother pushing a stroller with a child and a regular, normal person that’s just crossing the road?
Rose Dickey: We could have a quick show of hands. Has anyone been in that situation?
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Carmera, the mapping startup for autonomous vehicles, raises $20 million
Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information — like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double-parked vehicle — so they can take the safest and most efficient route possible.
This specific need has provided an opening for startups in what once looked like a locked-up mapping market dominated by a few giants.
Carmera, a New York-based mapping and data analytics startup, is one of them. The company, which came out of stealth two years ago, has now raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. Carmera previously raised $6.5 million.
The company announced the funding raise Thursday along with a few other updates, including a new feature on its autonomous mapping product and a partnership with New York City. The capital will be used to hire more talent and expand.
“We’ll be doing the most aggressive hiring we’ve ever done this next year,” Carmera co-founder and CEO Ro Gupta told TechCrunch, adding that the company will mostly focus on building out its New York and Seattle offices. Carmera, which has about 25 employees, plans to have more than 50 by the end of next year.
“The money also allows us to be more prospective than simply reacting to customer needs,” Gupta added.
In other words, Carmera can move into new markets where it suspects there will be a need in the future, not just wait for a call from their customers. One of those customers is Voyage, the autonomous driving startup that currently operates self-driving cars in retirement communities.
Carmera has an interesting business model, and one that’s likely attractive to investors looking for startups with a present-day revenue stream. The company describes itself as a street intelligence platform for autonomy. Its main product is the Carmera autonomous map, a high-definition map for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers and robotaxis.
The twist here is that the company uses data gleaned from its other product — a fleet-monitoring service used by commercial customers with vehicles driven by humans — to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk with their vehicles and drivers.
These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities. Carmera calls this a “pro-sourcing” swarm.
The startup has now added a real-time events and change-management engine to its autonomous map that Gupta contends is a major leap forward because it not only provides more detailed information to self-driving vehicles, it gives these driverless vehicles a suggested path.
In some mapping products, there’s generally a base map and then a dynamic overlay. The problem, Gupta explains, is that when things change, like a lane closure, the dynamic map only flags it, leaving it up to the vehicle to figure out what to do next.
“That works fine when humans are driving, it just doesn’t go far enough for AVs,” Gupta said. “What they need to know is how do I path plan around it?”
Carmera’s real-time events and change-management feature
The map will detect a change in milliseconds, classify it within seconds and then validate and redraw the base map within minutes, according to Carmera. The company is giving companies deploying autonomous vehicles API access to this data at every stage.
Carmera also has a “site intelligence product,” a jargon term that means the company provides spatial data and street analytics (like how pedestrians move within a particular intersection) to urban planners.
Carmera announced Thursday it will begin sharing data such as historical pedestrian analytics and real-time construction detection with New York City’s Department of Transportation. Carmera will get access to key city data sets in return. The partnership with NYC DOT follows an earlier-data sharing initiative with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
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