Otto
2016 - 2018, 3 years old
A self-driving truck startup that made the first commercial autonomous freight delivery before being absorbed and shut by Uber.
Otto came out of stealth in May 2016 and was sold to Uber in August of the same year for a reported 680 million dollars in stock, before it had shipped a real product. In October 2016 it ran a retrofitted truck 120 miles on a Colorado highway to deliver Budweiser, a stunt that defined early autonomous-trucking hype. Waymo then sued, alleging co-founder Anthony Levandowski had walked out of Google with 14,000 confidential files; Uber fired him in 2017 and settled with Waymo for 245 million dollars in 2018. Uber shut the entire self-driving trucks unit on July 30, 2018, citing a need to focus on robotaxis, and laid off or reassigned the remaining team.
- Founded
- 2016-01
- Shut down
- 2018-07-30
- Funding raised
- Undisclosed
- Years alive
- 3
- Founders
- Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay, Don Burnette