Listen to this article

Oxbotica’s Driver aims to turn any vehicle into an autonomous vehicle. | Source: Oxbotica

Oxbotica announced that it brought in $140 million in Series C funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $225 million. Oxbotica aims to use the investment to drive expansion into new geographical markets and more quickly deploy its autonomy software. 

Oxbotica’s flagship product, the Oxbotica Driver, is a full-stack autonomy system. It’s made up of on-vehicle software modules that can work with any sensor, vehicle or platform. With the platform, users have access to the full spectrum of autonomous vehicle (AV) functionality, including device drivers, mapping, obstacle detection, sensor perception and prediction. 

It also offers Oxbotica Cloud, which connects autonomous vehicles to customers’ existing fleet management platforms, and the Oxbotica MetaDriver, which aims to reduce the time and cost of the verification and validation process when implementing AVs. 

“This landmark investment from world-class investors is a tremendous validation of our strategy to apply self-driving technology where there is persistent and urgent demand—in supply chains, industrial sectors and in decongesting our cities,” Gavin Jackson, CEO of Oxbotica, said in a release. 

New investors Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co. and ENEOS Innovation Partners participated in the round, along with previous investors bp ventures, BGF, Halma, Hostplus, Kiko Ventures (IP Group), Ocado Group, Tencent, Venture Science and ZF. 

“Oxbotica was founded eight years ago on the vision of Universal Autonomy—providing safe and sustainable autonomy that is independent of workplace and vehicle type,” Paul Newman, CTO and founder of Oxbotica, said in a release. “With the greatest engineering talent and experience, using the best of AI, robotics and the metaverse, we are delivering on that promise to create value for our customers, our communities and our planet. We welcome our new investors who share our bold vision to redefine the role of the human in the operation of vehicles.”

The company plans to use the fresh funding to drive its geographical expansion into North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and expand into new operating system domains. These include agriculture, airports, energy, goods delivery, mining and shared passenger transportation. Oxbotica plans to target domains that have an urgent need for autonomy and the potential to scale with that autonomy.