Autonomous delivery startup Nuro has reached an agreement with safety-focused software company Foretellix to assist in virtual testing of its autonomous driving system in an effort to reduce R&D costs while pushing the technology forward.
The partnership, which the companies are set to announce later Thursday, comes after a tumultuous period for Nuro.Once a darling in the AV industry, the delivery startup has raised more than $2 billion from high-profile investors including Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Google. Two layoffs In the past 18 months, including Reorganization In May 2023, Nuro abandoned planned commercial operations.
Nuro is also working with Foretellix at a time when the broader AV industry is changing and GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise makes significant spending cuts its workforce and start multiple leadersTuSimple Exit the US market and Argo AI Close Fall 2022.
“We’re always looking to operate as efficiently as possible,” Dave Ferguson, one of Nuro’s co-founders, told TechCrunch via email. “We have worked hard to diligently manage our capital as the company has grown, and this is another example. But this is in the normal course of operations and does not indicate any change in plans.”
Foretellix, founded in 2018 and partially backed by Toyota and Nvidia, recently raised funding Completed US$43 million in financing in December. It already has similar deals with Volvo Group and Torc Robotics for its verification and validation software.
Many companies developing autonomous vehicles have their own simulation software; Foretellix specializes in generating millions of scenarios to test autonomous software, relieving the burden on internal teams.
“The product itself is a huge productivity boost because if you had to develop all these scenarios one by one, it would take a lot of time,” Foretellix CEO and co-founder Ziv Binyamini told TechCrunch.
Foretellix’s software can “automatically analyze” the driving logs of Nuro test vehicles and rerun those drives multiple times in simulations. This allows Nuro’s automated system to encounter many different versions of the drive without the difficulty (and, most importantly, time) required to run all these variations in the real world.
Foretellix declined to disclose financial data about the deal, but Binyamini said his company has been discussing a partnership with Nuro for about a year and that they have already begun working together.
This story has been updated to include response from Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson.
