India’s First Self-Driving Car Startup Minus Zero Raises $1.7 Million

Minus Zero, India’s first business to manufacture inexpensive fully autonomous vehicles has raised $1.7 million in a venture round headed by Chiratae Ventures. The round also included JITO Angel Network, a few top executives from American chipmaker NVIDIA, and US-based ride-hailing service Lyft, which competes with Uber.

Minus Zero intends to use the funds to grow its workforce and establish a large autonomous car research and development infrastructure in order to bring its first vehicle on the road by late 2022 or early 2023.

Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra launched the Bengaluru-based business in 2021, and it employs a combination of camera-based vision and algorithms to power its self-driving technology. The business claims to have many patents “in the pipeline” and a distinctive self-driving approach that replicates human intuition, allowing the software to make confident decisions even with limited data inputs.

“This enables robust decision making, which is critical for safe navigation in settings where extrinsic factors such as inadequate traffic infrastructure, rash driving, harsh weather, and so on would have otherwise jeopardized the vehicle’s safety,” stated Gagandeep Reehal, CEO and CTO of Minus Zero.

TCM Sundaram, founder, and vice-chairperson of Chiratae Ventures commented on the investment, saying that autonomous vehicles are no longer a pipe dream and must become a reality soon. He pointed out that expanding autonomous vehicles beyond a few cities requires rethinking rather than depending on expensive technologies.

Minus Zero, which is still in its early stages, competes with global tech heavyweights like Tesla and Google, which have been working on self-driving technology for years. No major Indian company is currently testing autonomous vehicles since the technology is projected to take longer to embrace due to traffic congestion, diverse terrains, and other factors.