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The San Francisco-based startup had raised just over $20 million since it was founded in 2015. Its last fundraise, a $16.5 million led by , took place in March 2018. Previous investors include , , and 9Point Ventures.

At the time of its Series A, Starsky announced that it had successfully driven its self-driving cargo truck for seven miles without a driver, according to .

“No safety driver behind the wheel, no engineer hiding on the bunk. We are the first company to make driverless trucks a reality,” Starsky Robotics’ co-founder CEO said in a blog post then.

Fast-forward just over two years, and Seltz-Axmacher published a with a far more somber tone titled simply, “The End of Starsky Robotics.” He wrote:

“In 2015, I got obsessed with the idea of driverless trucks and started Starsky Robotics. In 2016, we became the first street-legal vehicle to be paid to do real work without a person behind the wheel. In 2018, we became the first street-legal truck to do a fully unmanned run, albeit on a closed road. In 2019, our truck became the first fully-unmanned truck to drive on a live highway.

And in 2020, we’re shutting down.”

It’s unclear exactly how many employees will be affected by the shutdown, but a photo from February 2019 posted on Seltz-Axmacher’s blog shows “much of Starsky’s office team,” with just under three dozen employees.

In a March 19 , Seltz-Axmacher details how things fell apart at the company. By Nov. 12, 2019, Starsky’s $20 million Series B had fallen through, and most of the team was furloughed just three days later in what he described as “probably the worst day of my life.” The founders then started working on selling the company, and “making sure the team didn’t go without shelter.”

What happened?

With so many autonomous vehicle funding companies raising millions of dollars as of late, one has to wonder what happened in the case of Starsky Robotics.

Seltz-Axmacher blames timing in part for his company’s demise.

In his blog post, he said the space was too overwhelmed “with the unmet promise of AI to focus on a practical solution.”

He continued:

“As those breakthroughs failed to appear, the downpour of investor interest became a drizzle. It also didn’t help that last year’s tech IPOs took a lot of energy out of the tech industry, and that trucking has been in a recession for 18 or so months.”

Seltz-Axmacher also noted that investors didn’t seem to care for the company’s model of being the operator. He also claimed that Starsky’s “heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.”

Currently in the process of selling the assets of the company, Seltz-Axmacher said those assets include a number of patents essential to operating unmanned vehicles.

Meanwhile, ’s raised a staggering $2.25 billion earlier this month. That deal came just 10 months after rival self-driving car outfit at an approximate $18 billion post-money valuation. In February 2019, self-driving car startup raised $530 million in a led by .

Starsky’s competitors include (which raised last September) and Canada’s .

According to VentureBeat, in September 2017 Starsky Robotics completed the longest end-to-end autonomous trip on record. “After Hurricane Irma hit southwestern Florida, the company used one of its trucks to aid recovery efforts, hauling water 68 miles from one end of the state to the other without human intervention.”

I’m no self-driving expert but that sounds pretty cool.

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To answer that question, Crunchbase took a look at founders and CEOs across several groupings of startup unicorns. The research included the most heavily funded private companies, newly minted unicorns and companies that recently crossed the $5 billion valuation mark.

The short answer? Yes, immigrants are still heavily represented in the ranks of U.S. unicorn founders and CEOs. They hail from multiple continents, and are leading companies in sectors from e-commerce to crypto to pharmaceuticals.

The long answer? Yes, but maybe less so. Early data indicates the proportion of high-valuation U.S. startups founded or led by immigrants may be trending down some. One factor is the growth of startup hubs outside the U.S., making it easier for founders to launch companies in their home country. The other, most notorious factor: the hurdles of securing a visa as a would-be startup founder.

“There is no visa specifically for someone who wants to start a company,” according to , founding partner at , a Silicon Valley-based firm that invests in U.S. startups with immigrant founders.

While U.S. student enrollment of foreign nationals roughly doubled from 2007 to 2018, there hasn’t been a corresponding strategy to speed or simplify graduates’ pursuit of a green card, Mehta said. And although that issue predates Trump’s election, the current administration hasn’t helped, deciding not to implement an Obama-era .

Still, a striking percentage of funded private companies that crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold this past year are immigrant founded. Below, we take a look at 19 such companies, along with a look founders’ countries of origin.

We also look at the most heavily funded, highest-valuation private companies overall with immigrant founders and CEOs.

The big picture

If investors are backing fewer immigrant-led U.S. startups, it may be because there are fewer available to back. For the 2018-19 period, U.S. immigration declined to 595,000 people—the lowest level since the 1980s, according to one oft-cited . It’s a level that leaves even some members of the Trump administration’s inner circle concerned that immigration levels are to support economic growth.

Of course, one needn’t be a new immigrant to launch a high-flying startup. Many of the successful founders on our lists above immigrated years or decades before their companies took flight. The lists, overall, include immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children as well as those who came later, commonly to attend universities.

Lastly, we should keep in mind that immigration, like unicorns, venture funding and startup valuations, has historically been rather cyclical. The issues confronting immigrant founders today may very well fade away or morph into something completely different in coming years.

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Of course, less is relative. A Crunchbase News tally of reported funding rounds for startups in the core Silicon Valley counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo finds that companies there have pulled in more than $15.4 billion so far this year. That’s a huge sum, and is roughly on pace with 2018 funding levels.1

As a percentage of total California funding, however, Silicon Valley is slipping.

Until about five years ago, the two-county region pretty reliably took in more than 40 percent of statewide seed through growth stage financing. In recent years, its share has regularly dwindled to less than a third of statewide totals.

Blame San Francisco

The money isn’t going far away. Silicon Valley’s declining share of funding comes as its neighbor to the North, San Francisco, continues to suck up ever-growing sums of capital.

As we reported earlier this month, San Francisco is devouring California’s venture funding to feed its vast stables of startups and money-losing unicorns. In roughly the first three quarters of 2019, companies based in the city raised around 45 percent of statewide seed through pre-IPO funding, per Crunchbase data.

The ascent of San Francisco seems to prove out the notion that startup epicenters aren’t driven by space to sprawl. San Francisco covers just 47 square miles  – compared to 2,000 square miles for the Silicon Valley counties.

Silicon Valley Is Still Drawing Near-Record Sums Of Capital

Still, it’s important to recognize that while Silicon Valley is drawing a smaller share of California’s total venture funding, in dollar terms investment is actually rising. In recent years, companies in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have collectively hauled in roughly double the annual tallies raised at the beginning of the decade.

It’s not entirely surprising to see a rise in investment totals alongside a decline in investment share. That’s because a lot more money overall has been going to the startup and unicorn space in the past few years. That’s led to higher investment totals in most tech hubs — just some more than others.

In case anyone’s wondering, Silicon Valley companies still raise some of the biggest rounds of anyone in startup-land. This year, for instance, top funding recipients include:

• , a Mountain View-based robotics startup developing autonomous delivery vehicles, raised $940 million in a February Series B round backed by SoftBank.

• , a Palo Alto-based developer of hardware and software for a self-driving vehicle platform, raised a total of $600 million in two Series B funding announcements this year, with lead investors including Sequoia Capital and Hyundai.

• , the zero-commission stock and crypto trading provider, raised $323 million in a Series E round led by DST Global, bringing total funding to date to more than $860 million.
• , the fast-growing scooter and bike sharing service, closed on a $310 million Series D round earlier this year to build out its already enormous footprint.

So far this year, Silicon Valley companies have scored at least 42 known “supergiant” funding rounds of $100 million or more. And the Sand Hill Road corridor is still chock-full of venture capitalists with big checks to write.

So, does it matter for Silicon Valley that more startups are headquartering in nearby San Francisco (and, to some extent, the East Bay)? One could argue it doesn’t make too much difference, as these places are within commuting distances of each other.

Seeing more startups blossom just outside the Valley also isn’t obviously a bad thing for locals. Silicon Valley still lays claim to ultra-low unemployment rates, high average incomes, and a highly educated populace. The region’s downsides — scarce housing, high cost of living, and traffic — are more the result of too many tech and startup jobs rather than too few.

Moreover, the surge in overall startup funding levels means Silicon Valley is still seeing as much investment as ever. Plus, the region is already home to an outsized share of the most valuable established tech and tech-adjacent companies, including Google, Facebook, PayPal, Cisco, Tesla, and the list goes on.

So, in short, Silicon Valley doesn’t appear to be getting any less tech-centric. The region’s innovation engine, however, is increasingly reaching farther beyond its original borders.

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