German mobility startup Vay said on Tuesday it had raised $95 million from investors such as Kinnevik, Coatue and Eurazeo, as it planned to launch its first car-rental service in Hamburg next year. A customer could use a mobile app to book an electric car that would be delivered to the pick-up location by a driver steering the vehicle remotely. The customer could then drive it like a normal car and the remote operator moves to steering a different car.
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A new approach to driverless mobility
Join the journeyThe Journey Begins
Vay will launch a driverless, certified, commercial mobility service on public streets. Starting later this year.
Unique about Vay is its teledrive-first approach to autonomous driving. Vay’s advanced technology enables a person (the “teledriver”) to remotely drive a vehicle (“teledriving”). This allows for a safe and timely rollout of driverless mobility services that users and cities trust as a human is still in full control.
Vay's Services
Vay will start by offering the most affordable door-to-door transportation service. People can order a car, which arrives within a few minutes, and then drive themselves to their destination.
Upon arrival they will be able to leave the car without having to park it. This will be offered at a fraction of the cost of an Uber ride, which is why Vay believes its service will be highly competitive with owning a car in urban areas. Additional use cases can range from ride hailing to ride sharing, from parcel to food delivery, from buses to trucks.
Safety first.
Vay’s system is built to be safer than conventional driving by controlling the top four causes of fatal urban accidents, which are driving under the influence, speeding, distraction, and fatigue. In addition, Vay’s teledrivers have augmented skills, including 360-degree vision. In addition, relevant pedestrians, cyclists or cars can be highlighted on the video stream.
Lastly, Vay’s system is engineered to the highest and latest automotive safety & cybersecurity standards (ISO26262, ISO21434) and is using redundancies throughout the entire system, including on its hardware components and its cellular network connectivity.
Teledriving as a new path to an autonomous future.
A human-machine collaboration.
Vay’s teledrive-first approach allows for a safe and timely rollout of mobility services that users and cities trust as a human is still in full control.
Over time, while serving customers and based on high quality teledriving data, Vay is able to learn and then launch autonomous features gradually - starting with the ones that are safe and ready to deploy. Vay believes that we will enter a decade of human-machine collaboration instead of directly reaching full autonomy.
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Dec 14, 2021
German mobility startup Vay raises $95m
Dec 14, 2021
Start-up Vay: 84 Millionen Euro für ferngesteuerte Autos im Straßenverkehr
Mit ferngesteuerten Autos, die sich durch den Stadtverkehr bewegen, will das Berliner Start-up Vay eine völlig neue Art des Taxis erfinden. Dafür hat das Unternehmen neue Investoren gefunden und eine zweite große Finanzierungsrunde über 84 Millionen Euro abgeschlossen. Das Gesamtinvestment in die Firma beläuft sich nun auf 128 Millionen Euro. Vay ist damit das bestfinanzierte Unternehmen Europas im Segment des autonomen Fahrens.
Artikel lesenDec 14, 2021
Robocar Startup Vay Plans To Bring Remotely-Driven Cars To Hamburg
Vay might be able to skip for now some of the expensive, and technical heavy lifting, of using Lidar lasers, radar and cameras to teach an algorithm to drive but relying on a remote driver presents major challenges of its own. The startup’s vehicles are designed to pullover automatically if they lose connection with the control room but the issue of lag delaying reaction times in a busy city centre has plagued other self-driving startups.
Read articleDec 14, 2021
Self-driving startup Vay to launch commercial teledriven service in Hamburg in 2022
Vay, a company that is trying to get self-driving car services to market faster by pursuing a teledriven approach, has raised a $95 million Series B round to help it launch its first commercial service in Hamburg, Germany sometime in 2022. The startup plans to offer a transportation service where a user can order a car to be delivered to their door, drive the car themselves to their destination and then just hop out, leaving the job of parking it to the remote operator.
Read articleOct 15, 2021
Riesenvorteil, wenn man den Fahrer vom Fahrzeug trennt
Im Podcast sprechen Thomas von der Ohe und Handelsblatt-Reporterin Larissa Holzki über die Sicherheit der Technologie, die Herausforderungen bei Entwicklung und Zulassung und die Frage, wie man damit Geld verdienen kann.
Artikel lesen & Podcast hörenOct 10, 2021
Hamburg und Vay starten 2022 weltweit ersten und einzigartigen Telefahr-Mobilitätsservice ohne Fahrer im Auto
Wir teilen Hamburgs Vision, Mobilität von Grund auf neu zu denken, mit den Bürgerinnen und Bürgern sowie dem Umweltschutz im Zentrum der Überlegungen. Zudem sehen wir das Potenzial, den Hamburger Bürgerinnen und Bürgern einen Service anzubieten, der sie komfortabel, umweltfreundlich und preiswert in die Arbeit, zur nächsten Bus- oder Bahnhaltestelle oder zum Ziel ihrer Wahl bringt.
Artikel lesenSep 7, 2021
Driverless cars to arrive on European streets next year
From next year, you’ll be able to ride in a driverless car in Europe. It won’t be driven by a lidar-equipped computer, however, but piloted remotely by a human ‘teledriver’ sitting in a control room somewhere distant. This, at least, is the vision of Vay, a Berlin-based startup that is today emerging from stealth mode to unveil its plans for the future of mobility.
Read articleSep 7, 2021
Berliner Start-up fährt seit zwei Jahren Autos per Fernsteuerung durch Berlin
Die Telefahrer von Vay sehen die Straße nur durch Kameras. 2022 will die Firma mit einem neuartigen Taxidienst starten. Das Handelsblatt ist mitgefahren.
Artikel lesenSep 7, 2021
Stealth Robocar Startup Sees Remote Drivers as Autonomy Shortcut
Deploying vast fleets of robocars has been much tougher than Tesla Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and others thought. One European startup is now pitching an intermediate step to full autonomy: teledriving. Germany’s Vay, which has been quietly testing a fleet of remote-controlled electric vehicles all over Berlin, plans to roll out a mobility service in Europe and potentially the U.S. next year.
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Look who already
joined the journey!

Coatue

Gustav Söderström
CPO/CTO (Chief RnD Officer) at Spotify

Kinnevik

Niall Wass
CEO, SVP, COO, CCO at various tech enabled consumer start-ups. Former SVP International, Uber across 50 countries. Investor at Atomico & currently on 5 boards including Vay.

Atomico

Patrick Pichette
Partner at Inovia Capital, chairman of the board at Twitter, former global CFO at Google.

Nico Rosberg
F1 World Champion and Greentech Investor / Entrepreneur.

Cristina Stenbeck
Board member of Spotify, chairman of the board at Zalando, former executive chairman of Investment AB Kinnevik.

Creandum

Niklas Zennstroem
Founder of Skype, Kazaa and Atomico.

La Famiglia

Jeannette zu Fürstenberg
Founding Partner at La Famiglia, Member of the Digital Supervisory Board of Lufthansa, Investor into Lilium, the leading EVOTL company, Kodiak Robotics, the market leader for autonomous simulation software.

Signals

Qasar Younis
Co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, former COO and Partner of Y Combinator.

Eurazeo

Founders of FlixMobility
Mobility/Tech Investors and Entrepreneurs.

Visionaries Club

Robert Lacher
Founding Partner of Visionaries Club & La Famiglia.

System One

Project A
