Swaayatt Robots, a Bhopal, India-based autonomous driving startup, has raised $4 million from US-based angel investors, at a valuation of $151 million, Sanjeev Sharma, founder of the company, announced on LinkedIn, according to a press release dated June 8. The fundraise was part of a larger round, which would see the startup raise the remainder of the funds at a valuation of $175 million.
“Going forward we will be significantly scaling up our research and development (R&D) in all frontiers of autonomous driving, specifically pushing the boundaries in unsupervised and (inverse) reinforcement learning to showcase our sustainably scalable Level-5 autonomous driving technology architecture,” Sharma wrote in his post on the networking site.
Established in 2015, Swaayatt Robots is working in the fields of motion planning and decision making, perception, localization, and controls. The company aims to develop Level 5 autonomous driving technology. Swaayatt’s imminent objective is to conduct autonomous driving demonstration on Indian roads at 100 kilometers per hour (kph), which the company believes, will serve as a tangible showcase of its technology’s capabilities, illustrating how its autonomous systems can navigate real-world environments at high speeds.
“Our advanced perception and behavior planning algorithms have reached a point where the necessity for high-definition 3D mapping of environments is greatly reduced. In the context of autonomous driving, dense maps no longer remain an indispensable component. Instead, we have demonstrated the capability to rely on GPS maps for seamless end-to-end navigation,” according to a posting by Swaayatt on its website.
