Cruising

The autonomous car market is hot right now. Everyone is in the race to autonomy from humble startups with only one employee (Comma) to full fledged Detroit powerhouses such as GM. But sometimes you have to take out your wallet and pay for a burst of innovation. That’s exactly what GM did when they dropped $1 billion for an autonomous car startup called Cruise Automation.

Yep, one billion dollars! The deal was announced in March and validated the concept of autonomous cars.

But let’s dive right into Cruise, shall we? Cruise Automation was founded in 2013 by Jeremy Guillory, Daniel Kan, and Kyle Vogt.

Basically, Cruise made these aftermarket kits so that cars could be enabled with an autopilot feature. Their kit included software that was the best in the business and sensors that aggregated all of the driving data. Then, the software and hardware would work in harmony to drive the car all by itself.

However the kit was only available on the Audi A4 and S4 since they were pretty early stage and lacked the time needed to launch it on other cars. No problem since they had some really neat tech and were one of the pioneers in the space. Plus, the kit was just a little box that was placed on the roof of the car (nothing like the obnoxious sensors and cameras on other cars). The kit with everything in it sold for around $10,000.

Things were going pretty great. They had a good team of 50 skilled people and $18.8 million in the bank. Some of their notable investors include Y Combinator, SV Angel, Qualcomm Ventures, and Spark Capital. There were a plethora of individual angel investors that supported the idea also.

Rumor has it (according to Fortune) that GM wanted to be a majority investor in Cruise. But they couldn’t resist and snagged up the company for a cool billion! One of the reasons they bought Cruise was to take their tech and since they had really bright engineers. So everyone moved over to GM and right now Cruise says that they implemented their tech into electric Chevy Bolts for testing. Rumor also has it that 2017 GM models like the Cadillac CT6 will get an autopilot feature supposedly called “Super Cruise”.

Autonomous cars are happening guys. Right now we are in the baby steps of the phenomenon (having an optional autopilot). But in five years, don’t be surprised to see fully autonomous production cars roaming around.