Jun 25, 2020
13 Million New Reasons to Accelerate On Our Innovation
Sound Ventures, Kevin Durant and Adam D’Angelo participate in our seed round and we emerge from stealth.
Thirteen million dollars. That’s where we netted after our seed round concluded, and our efforts, led by CEO and co-founder Vlad Voroninski, are moving forward with a newly accelerated influx of funding.
So when four years ago we found an opportunity to remove costly bottlenecks in autonomous vehicle technological development with a breakthrough in AI we call “Deep Teaching,” we found a way to take deep learning even deeper.
“We identified some key challenges that we felt like weren’t being addressed with the traditional approaches,” Voroninski said. “We built some prototypes early on that made us believe that we can actually take this all the way.”
Unlike many other major players in the autonomous space, here at Helm.ai, we’re focused solely on the software. We aren’t building the compute platform or sensors required for a self-driving vehicle. Instead, we’re “creating software that tries to understand sensor data as well as a human would, in order to be able to drive,” says Voroninski.
Ever since we started in 2016 along with co-founder and partner Tudor Achim, we’ve been in stealth. Now, we’ve come out of stealth with a seed funding announcement of $13 million.
We are honored to have as investors this round:
- A.Capital Ventures
- Amplo
- Binnacle Partners
- Fontinalis Partners
- Sound Ventures
- SV Angel
Additionally, more than a dozen angel investors are also believing in Helm.ai, including Berggruen Holdings founder Nicolas Berggruen, Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, professional NBA player Kevin Durant, Retired Gen. David Petraeus, Matician co-founder and CEO Navneet Dalal, Quiet Capital managing partner Lee Linden and Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev, among still others.
“Helm.ai’s self-driving technologies are uniquely suited to deliver on the potential of autonomous driving”, said Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. “I look forward to the advances the team will continue to make in the years to come and am excited to have invested in the company.”
What will we do at Helm.ai with the influx? We’ll continue to advance our engineering prowess and focus heavily on R&D… as well as keep developing our methodologies and building deals with customers, OEMs, suppliers and partners. We’ll also add to our existing Menlo Park team.
It’s time to keep pushing innovation and unsupervised learning forward. The list of those willing to scale and see our breakthroughs all the way through is getting longer, and although there’s much that’s still (purposefully) kept under wraps, the secret’s out of stealth, and the road ahead is calling.
