When James Cox, former leader of Uber ride-sharing product Uberpool, left the company in 2019, the Silicon Valley giant abandoned the development of autonomous vehicles and sold the division entirely. Uberpool was struggling to get it settled, but Cox felt that a big opportunity was being overlooked. We took the heart of Uberpool’s technology and applied it to Robotaxis.
For the past five years, Cox has instead run a small startup called a routing company. This helps transport match the riders and vehicles quickly and inexpensively. During that time, the routing company has arranged 3 million trips in 13 US states and five countries.
But now the routing company has landed Zoox, the first Robotaxi client.
The routing company announced Wednesday that it has signed a deal with Amazon-owned Robotaxi company. Zoox will be powered by five startup engineers to purchase non-exclusive licenses for the technology of the routing company and “advance the efficiency and scalability” of fledgling Robotaxi services.
Cox himself will become senior advisor to Mike White, the Chief Product Officer of Zoox. However, the former Uber executive continues as CEO of the routing company. The new technologies that those engineers develop within Zoox remain in companies owned by Amazon. The company refused to disclose terms.
The deal is the latest example of how Robotaxi companies seek help in deploying real-world fleets. Waymo recently announced a series of operational partnerships with companies such as Uber and Avis. Last year, Delivery Startup Nuro outsourced it to Foretellix, which assists Toyota in simulation work to reduce R&D costs.
“We hope that this agreement will expand the positive impact of technology amid what will be a very rapid expansion in the field of Robotaki,” Cox told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Zoox said in a statement that it believes it will help new team members grow. The company plans to bring its early rider program to San Francisco and provide paid public rides in Las Vegas later this year.
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Cox said the work his company did on transport was some of the “most rewarding and challenging things I’ve ever worked.”
However, he said he was excited to start working with the Robotaxi company, because of how fast they can move.
“I think the speed at which technology and its benefits can potentially be faster on the self-driving vehicle side,” he said.
Cox believes that better route optimization software is essential to building large-scale Robotaxi networks and states that it is a “very important but unloved component of both AV stacks and ride-sharing stacks.” It’s also very difficult to get it right.
“Imagine playing chess in four dimensions. The board was melting, the pieces were costly to move themselves, and all of the pieces were moving, and you have to do all of that in real time,” Cox said. “Players who don’t take all that confusion into account in their live way will always struggle.”
