Minus Zero bags $1.7 million

Minus Zero, India's first startup dedicated to developing affordable fully self-driving cars, has raised $1.7 million in a seed round led by Chiratae Ventures. The round was also attended by JITO Angel Network, a few senior executives from American chipmaker NVIDIA, and US-based ride hailing service Lyft, which competes with Uber.

Minus Zero intends to use this funding to expand its team and build extensive autonomous vehicle research and development (R&D) infrastructure in order to have its first vehicle on the road by late 2022 to early 2023.

“Minus Zero believes that the complexity of self-driving cars can be solved not by stacking up more sensors or petabytes of data, but by making the AI more intuitive, similar to the way our own brain handles decision making,” the company said in a media statement.

The Bengaluru-based startup, founded in 2021 by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, drives its self-driving technology with a combination of camera-based vision and algorithms. The company claims to have multiple patents "in the pipeline" as well as a proprietary approach to self-driving that mimics human intuition, allowing the software to gain confident insights even with limited data inputs.