Zoox Taps Ex-OBERPOOL Exec Startup for Rounding Program

When James Cox, the former leader of the Uber’s Ride-Share, Uberpool, left that company in 2019, the Silicon Valley giant gave up the development of its independent cars and sold the entire section. While Uberpool had struggled to stick, Cox felt a tremendous opportunity to miss it: took the essence of Uberpool technology and applied to robotics.

Over the past five years, Cox has been running a small emerging company called Guidance CompanyWhich helps transportation agencies to match the cyclists quickly at a price. At that time, the guidance company helped arrange 3 million flights across 13 US states and five countries.

But now, the guidance company got its first customer from Robotaxi: Zoox.

The guidance company announced on Wednesday that it had concluded a deal with the company Robotaxi, owned by Amazon. Zoox will purchase an unprecedented license for the steering company technology, as well as bring five start -up engineers on “efficiency and expansion” for the emerging Robotaxi service.

Cox himself will become a great consultant for Mike White, chief product official in Zoox. But the former CEO of Uber will continue to work as the CEO of the guidance company. Any new technology developed by these engineers inside Zoox will remain with the company owned by Amazon. Companies refused to reveal the conditions.

The deal is the latest example of how to search for Robotaxi companies increasingly to help while spreading real world fleets. Waymo recently announced a series of operational partnerships with companies such as Uber and Aphis. Last year, Nuro’s start for delivery Using external sources of simulation work To the Toyota -backed Foretellix in an attempt to reduce research and development costs.

“I hope this deal will enable us to expand the positive effects of our technology within what will be a very rapid expansion in the Robotaxi space,” Cox told Techcrunch in an exclusive interview. Zoox said, in a statement, she believed that the new team members will help her. The company plans to bring its program early to San Francisco and provide paid public tours in Las Vegas later this year.

Cox said that the work that his company has accomplished with the transit agencies was some of the “most feasible and challenging things that I also worked on at all.”

But he said he was excited to start working with Robotaxi companies because of the speed that can move.

He said: “I think that the speed of technology and its benefits to more people will be faster on the side of the independent car.”

Cox believes that the best track improvement program is necessary to build a large -scale robotics network, and he said it is “a really important but unpleasant component of both AV and the passenger sharing stack.” It is also very difficult to obtain a right.

“Imagine chess playing in four dimensions, the painting was dissolved, and the cutting was moving itself, and there was a cost to move each piece – and you have to do all of this in an actual time,” Cox said. “Any player does not take everything in mind all this chaos in a living way will always be struggling.”