A startup investing fund in Israel announced that it raised $40 million to fund investment in driverless car technology.
Maniv Mobility raised the money from startup crowdfunding investment platform OurCrowd, Tata Motors Limited (NYSE: TTM) subsidiary Land Rover’s investing arm, and auto supplier
Valeo SA (EPA: FR) as well as equity investors.
The fund's thesis is that the companies propelling the rapid growth in the autonomous vehicle industry aren’t the old guard auto
makers or even the Silicon Valley tech set of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA). No, the true creators behind the nitty-gritty components that will make
self-driving cars a reality are startups. A diaspora of new-age
original equipment manufacturers are plugging away at designing machine learning algorithms and object detection software that will
do the actual work of driving your autonomous car.
Maniv Mobility founder Michael Granoff tackled this head-on after moving to Israel from the U.S. in 2013. Granoff recognized the
country’s diversity of innovative startups that were approaching mobility in unexpected ways and felt the undeniable urge to become
a supporter of the burgeoning field. In 2016, Granoff founded Maniv Mobility, a venture capital
fund with a focus on transportation technology.
“I noticed that there were a lot of startups that had pieces of the [mobility] puzzle,” said Granoff. “ I started to get to know
them and make personal investments. After doing that for 2-3 years it became pretty apparent that there was enough behind the
scenes, that there were enough interesting startups in Israel, that it called for more than my own dabbling. It called for its own
fund. Last summer we went out and raised one.”
Only a year later, the Maniv Mobility’s portfolio includes more than a dozen companies developing transportation technology. Its
companies are building everything from vehicle-to-vehicle communication tools to computer learning navigation software.
In laying out the fund’s vision, Granoff elaborated on the dichotomy between the simplicity of a fully realized autonomous
future and the complexity involved in actually achieving that given the current model of personal transportation.
“What it’s about is about finding better mobility,” Granoff said. “Mobility today for many people involves owning this expensive
asset that requires insuring, fueling, maintaining, parking. It requires putting up with having to be ideally undistracted for the
hours that you have to sit behind the wheel.”
Granoff wants to fund companies whose goals are removing the barriers to getting around that most people assume are
necessities.
“What we are talking about is, instead of the Uber experience, what if using a smartphone could summon a one-seater, a
comfortable electric self driving pod that could take you across town for a fraction of the cost of driving at a much greater
convenience?” he said. “Or if your family wants to go on a weekend trip, summoning a living room-style vehicle that you could all
be comfortable in and not have to be concerned with the stresses of operating the vehicle.”
‘We will be able to use the 20-25 percent of our cities that we devote for our cars for something else’
Maniv Mobility is not Granoff’s first foray into the forecasted future of autos. He previously worked as a founding member of
the Securing America’s Future Energy think tank, which lobbied to promote electric vehicles as a necessary alternative to what he
viewed as a dangerously monopolistic and politically fraught energy industry.
In his opinion, a lot of the opportunity for change comes from the sheer bloatedness of today’s transportation infrastructure.
He argues that if, through autonomy, society can reduce the need to dedicate massive amounts of space, human power, and money for
the sake of tens of millions of personal automobiles, those resources could be freed for other uses.
“We will be able to use the 20-25 percent of our cities that we devote for our cars for something else,” Granoff said. “We’ll be
able to pay for the mobility that we need and not buy the $45,000 SUV because twice a year we need that space, but the rest of the
time it’s one person schlepping around at 18 miles per gallon. It’s not just a better choice for individuals but, in aggregate, a
better change for society.”
The 4 Vital Segments Of An Autonomous Vehicle Society
From the perspective of building Maniv Mobility’s portfolio, Granoff highlighted four areas that he views as separate but vital
segments necessary to build an autonomous vehicle-centric society. Those are vehicle architecture, data connectivity, mobility
services and automation itself.
Each company in the fund fulfills elements of one or more of these four aspects. Nexar, for example, is an AI-powered dashboard camera that records risky behavior behind
the wheel. Two other companies in the fund, Ridecell and Turo, sell technology to help automakers, startups, and individuals launch on-demand driving
services. The former through information management and the latter by way of a peer-to-peer car-sharing model. Then there is
Oryx Vision, which builds detection systems for autonomous cars using
lasers.
Given the comprehensive approach of the fund and the abundance of pioneering startups within the space, Granoff is optimistic on
both the short-term viability and eventual prominence of autonomous mobility. He believes the watershed moment for driverless cars,
when thousands of people will experience the technology daily, is less than five years away.
“I believe automated driving is going to happen sooner than people expect. You already have autonomous taxi services in
several places around the world. I think we’ll see that increase in the coming years,” he said.
To be clear, Granoff’s vision of the autonomous future is not one where everyone owns their own personal vehicular chauffeur.
Granoff pictures a sea change in the way people think about the point-A-to-point-B equation. He explained that the measure of the
self-driving world’s success isn’t one of cars sold, but of distance navigated.
“[It’s] not how many self driving cars get built or get sold, the important question is how does the number of self-driven miles
compare to that of traditional vehicle miles? I think the crossover is 2030. That represents perhaps a bigger social change than
the introduction of the internet.”
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