Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

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.

Illustration:

Now that stocks are officially in bear market territory, and measures to curb coronavirus have turned the biggest tech hubs into work-from-home zones, we decided to check in to see if the downturn has yet impacted startup funding totals.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The broad finding: Not quite yet. A Crunchbase global analysis of sizable venture funding rounds ($10 million and up) shows that reported totals are down about 11 percent in 2020 compared to the same period last year.

Overall, investors have put $41.1 billion to work in reported rounds of $10 million and up through March 17 of this year, compared to $46.2 billion in the same period in 2019. Although it looks like a moderate decline, it’s actually too early to tell, given that a sizable percentage of financings actually get reported weeks or months after the date they close.

This year’s totals have been boosted by supergiant financings for a handful of companies, with a lot of the money going toward transportation. That includes -incubated autonomous transportation startup ($2.25 billion venture round), ride-hailing rivals and ($1.2 billion and $856 million, respectively) and electric aircraft developer ($590 million).

Major funding recipients in sectors other than transport, meanwhile, include plant-based meat producer ($500 million), banking upstart ($500 million) and data warehousing provider ($479 million).

Why are big deals happening in the current environment? Partly, it’s because big, complicated private financing rounds typically take weeks or months to close.

Thus, it’s not entirely surprising to see some of the largest private investments getting announced over the same period that major stock indexes are posting their largest declines in years. A deal put together in a more bullish climate might be made public in a more bearish one.

Earlier indications of funding cutbacks may be more easily seen for smaller rounds at early and seed stage, when sought-after deals come together more quickly. However, this is difficult for us to track here at Crunchbase because reporting delays are also most frequent at these earliest stages. So, it’s hard to determine whether a drop in funding is due to delayed reporting or fewer checks being written.

Historically, however, startup funding has trended sharply lower in recessionary times, including after the implosion of the dot-com bubble in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008-9.

If past cycles are any guide, we can expect a sharp startup funding slowdown in coming months. We’ll keep monitoring the funding totals for indications of that coming to pass.

Illustration: .

The autonomous driving company, previously incubated as an “other bets” project under the umbrella of , says it has raised a staggering $2.25 billion in financing from investors including , the , and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund . Other firms including , global automotive supplier , pre-owned vehicle listing service , and its corporate parent Alphabet also participated in Waymo’s round.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

“We’ve always approached our mission as a team sport, collaborating with our [original equipment manufacturer] and supplier partners, our operations partners and the communities we serve to build and deploy the world’s most experienced driver,” said , CEO of Waymo. “Today, we’re expanding that team, adding financial investors and important strategic partners who bring decades of experience investing in and supporting successful technology companies building transformative products. With this injection of capital and business acumen, alongside Alphabet, we’ll deepen our investment in our people, our technology and our operations, all in support of the deployment of the Waymo Driver around the world.”

Waymo did not say, precisely, what it will do with its newfound cash, but it did share a number of development and business milestones. The company says its autonomous Waymo Driver platform has driven “more than 20 million miles on public roads across over 25 cities, and over 10 billion miles in simulation.” Waymo added that the company has already shipped its first L4 autonomous vehicles (which include electric vehicles and Class 8 trucks, according to the company) with the company’s latest hardware and beefed onboard sensors and compute hardware.

The company also provided updates about Waymo One, its on-demand autonomous car service which currently operates in Arizona. The service has already provided thousands of trips to locals “in a high-speed mixed usage market area larger than San Francisco.”

The deal comes 10 months after rival self-driving car outfit at an approximate $18 billion post-money valuation. The , , and automakers and participated in the raise.

TechCrunch in March 2019 that the company was seeking outside investment at a lofty valuation. In September, to $105 billion from $175 billion, based on its discounted cashflows.

No information about the company’s valuation or other terms of today’s financing have been disclosed at this time.

Illustration: .

In late 2018, , an subsidiary, started a commercial rollout of self-driving cars in Arizona. As at the time, however, the cars were “staffed by the company’s drivers.” But, the moment seemed important. Here, at last, we were seeing Waymo’s expensive efforts into autonomous driving start to pay back.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Self-driving technology is incredibly expensive to develop, and hard to get right. Regarding cost, anyone can peruse the operating losses generated by Alphabet’s Other Bets efforts, which include Waymo. In terms of difficulty, a detailed a possible rise in total usage of the Waymo autonomous taxi service, along with some complaints regarding routing, and other mistakes.

No new technology reaches early-commercialization fully-baked. So, to see Waymo not rack up a perfect customer record in its first few quarters of public use is not surprising. (Waymo is also doing some intelligent, customer-friendly things to boost demand for the service, it was .)

All these Waymo reminders bring us to today’s news, namely that is planning on launching a self-driving tax service in Shanghai. According , Didi will have “30 different models of so-called level four autonomous vehicles in the Jiading district of Shanghai.” The cars will allow for drivers to assert control, similar to what we’ve seen in other self-driving vehicles.

Waymo and Didi are not the only companies getting their first self-driving commercial services up and running, but they caught our eye for a few reasons. First, Waymo as part of the Alphabet universe has access to huge financial resources. And in the case of Didi, it’s the China-based Uber-equivalent and a company that Uber owns a piece of. So, we expect the two companies to wind up as leaders in the self-driving taxi market.

Crunchbase News has written about self-driving rounds extensively. It would be interesting, and honestly exciting, to instead cover how private companies (like Didi) are racing public companies to drive the first billion dollars in self-driving car revenue. Especially as the major players have all spent far more than that on the projects.

�������ܲ��ٰ����پ��Dz�:��