autonomous-driving
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Alex Kendall’s car learned the wrong lesson.
An early Wayve experiment rewarded a car for distance travelled. It learned to zigzag. For Alex Kendall, the journey from that awkward lesson to production car agreements has been an education in what intelligence actually requires.
Mary Barra and the power of two words
Before she became CEO, Mary Barra cut GM’s ten-page dress code to “Dress appropriately.” Her larger project has been getting a century-old carmaker to trust people with decisions far harder than what to wear.
Julian Ma and the long road to ordinary
Julian Ma rode in front of his own autonomous truck to demonstrate its brakes. Years later, the Inceptio founder is pursuing a harder test: making the technology part of the everyday freight business.
Ro Gupta and the trouble with a finished map
Ro Gupta built CARMERA around a simple problem: streets change faster than maps. Now the New York founder leads Woven Capital, bringing the habits of a startup builder to Toyota’s $1.6 billion venture platform.
The Modem That Refuses to Stay Put: Hojun Kim’s Bet on Software-Defined Roads
After years designing chips, Hojun Kim is trying to make road infrastructure age more like software: upgradeable, interoperable and ready for the next radio standard.
Lei Xu Is Teaching Cars to See - Then Asking What Sight Is For
The former Tesla Vision engineer built Nullmax around a stubbornly practical idea: autonomous driving only matters when the software can leave the demo, fit the car and survive the road.
Hyunggi Cho Bet on the Part of Self-Driving That Had to Ship
A cafeteria conversation became a nine-year lesson in automotive patience. Hyunggi Cho built Phantom AI around the unfashionable idea that the road to autonomy begins with driver assistance people can actually use.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Schuyler Cullen
Schuyler Cullen is the co-founder and CEO of Summer Robotics, a Campbell, California machine-vision company building Kortx, a camera-free perception system that uses lasers and event sensors to give robots animal-like sight at 100Hz, 100-micron precision, and 20ms reaction time. A theoretical physicist by training with a Caltech double major and a Stanford PhD in string theory, Cullen spent two decades turning hard math into shipping technology - co-founding the video-recognition startup Keystream and leading AI and Robotics at Samsung, where he built the autonomous-mobility stack for the company's robots and cars. In 2025 Summer Robotics raised a Series A led by Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials.
Philipp Skogstad
Philipp Skogstad runs Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America - the Sunnyvale-to-San-Jose corridor of the company that invented the car. A Stanford-trained engineer who once managed open innovation programs at SAP, he now oversees an 830-person R&D operation that ships Drive Pilot (the only SAE-certified Level 3 system on US roads), the MBUX infotainment stack, and Mercedes' ChatGPT-in-the-dashboard experiment.
Junhwan Kim
Junhwan Kim is the CEO of STRADVISION, a South Korean AI perception company building the vision software that teaches cars to see. After selling his facial recognition startup Olaworks to Intel in 2012 - the first full acquisition of a Korean firm by Intel - he pivoted into automotive AI and helped build STRADVISION into a company with over 3 million cumulative production units deployed, $331M in total funding, and a pending KOSDAQ IPO. His flagship product, SVNet, runs on 50+ vehicle models across 13+ OEM partners and can identify pedestrians, lanes, traffic signs, and obstacles in real time on low-power edge chips.
Maxwell Zhou
Maxwell Zhou (周光) is the founder and CEO of DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving company he built from a 2019 conviction that AI could prevent traffic deaths. A Tsinghua-trained physicist turned AI PhD, Zhou led sensor fusion breakthroughs at Baidu and co-founded Roadstar.ai before pivoting to build what is now one of China's fastest-scaling third-party ADAS providers - deploying its end-to-end intelligent driving platform across 300,000+ vehicles and accumulating 1.3 billion kilometers of real-world data with over $500M in total funding.
Satoshi Sugie
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
Julian Zheren Ma
Julian Zheren Ma is the founder and CEO of Inceptio Technology, the company behind what is arguably the world's most deployed autonomous trucking network. Based in Santa Clara and Shanghai, Inceptio has put over 4,000 Level 3 autonomous heavy-duty trucks on real freight routes, logging 500+ million commercial kilometers with zero fatal accidents. Before building Inceptio, Julian was a Corporate VP at Tencent overseeing LBS, search, and early autonomous driving initiatives, then president of G7, China's leading logistics big data firm. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an MBA from IMD Switzerland, and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute China Fellowship Program.
Gani Jusuf
Gani Jusuf is the CEO and Co-Founder of AXONNE, a Silicon Valley fabless semiconductor startup reshaping how data moves inside vehicles. A UC Berkeley PhD with 25+ years in semiconductor engineering - including nearly 15 years as VP of Engineering at Marvell Technology - Jusuf co-founded AXONNE in 2018 to solve one of automotive's trickiest problems: getting massive streams of sensor data from cameras, radar, and LiDAR to compute units at multi-gigabit speeds over a single twisted-pair cable. Backed by Intel Capital, AXONNE's Cyton PHY and automotive Ethernet bridge products are used in next-generation ADAS and software-defined vehicle architectures.
Junwei Bao
Junwei Bao is the co-founder and CEO of Seyond (formerly Innovusion), a Silicon Valley-founded LiDAR company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a physics background from Peking University, Bao spent nearly two decades building precision optical sensors before pivoting to autonomous-driving hardware. He co-founded Timbre Technologies - the company that invented OCD (optical critical dimension) scatterometry, a kind of microscale LiDAR for semiconductors - then led Baidu's autonomous driving hardware division before founding Innovusion in 2016. Under his leadership, Seyond delivered 230,000 automotive-grade LiDAR units in 2024 and holds a 12.8% global ADAS LiDAR market share, ranking fourth worldwide.