Dusseldorf With remote-controlled cars that move through city traffic, the Berlin start-up Vay wants to invent a completely new type of taxi. To this end, the company has found new investors and completed a second major financing round of 84 million euros. The total investment in the company now amounts to 128 million euros. This makes Vay the best financed company in Europe in the autonomous driving segment.
“What we are planning is extremely ambitious, and for that we need investors with deep funding pockets,” says the boss and co-founder Thomas von der Ohe.
Vay plans to operate its first fleet of remote-controlled, electric vehicles commercially as early as next year. It should start in the Hamburg district of Bergedorf. Tests have been going on for more than two years.
The business idea is a mixture of taxi service and rental car offer. After a so-called tele driver has steered the car to the customer from a distance, the customer has to take a seat at the wheel himself and steer the car through traffic.
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The tele-drivers see the area around the car in a 360-degree perspective through cameras on the car, receive information about the speed and the condition of the road surface and can thus steer the car from their control cabin without having to sit directly at the wheel.
“The financing round enables us to further develop the technology,” says von der Ohe. In the medium term, the company wants to “bring thousands of electric vehicles to the streets in various cities”.
Remote control should only be the beginning: step by step towards autonomous driving
It is also conceivable to equip the vehicles with more and more autonomous functions. In this way, the company could approach fully autonomous driving, which is referred to as level 5 in specialist circles.
Accordingly, Vay has brought in financially strong investors: the Swedish investment company Kinnevik, the technology-focused investment company Coatue, founded in New York, and the French private equity firm Eurazeo are entering the current financing round.
Investors are interested in the founding team and their vision: Thomas von der Ohe founded Vay in 2018 together with hardware boss Fabrizio Scelsi and software boss Bogdan Djukic.
On the one hand, they emphasize that they want to oppose the leading and sometimes billion-dollar companies in autonomous driving from the USA and China with a different and European approach. On the other hand, Ohe wants to have a “positive impact” on society. The aim is to use the comparatively environmentally friendly electric cars from Vay to a much greater extent than private vehicles and to minimize the risk of accidents.
Zoox, BMW, Microsoft: Founders bring a lot of experience to the table
The founders bring relevant experience to the table. Informatiker von der Ohe was technical program manager at Zoox, one of the leading Silicon Valley companies in autonomous driving.
Vehicle engineer Scelsi headed the development department of P3 in San Francisco, which works on self-driving shuttles, and carried out autonomous driving projects for Audi and BMW. Djukic was a team leader at Microsoft and a senior software engineer at the messaging service Skype.
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and her family office La Famiglia as well as Robert Lacher from the early-stage investor Visionaries Club invested in Vay before the Berlin test drives became public.
“According to expert assessments, it will probably take another ten to 20 years before cars can drive fully autonomously even in confusing and fast-moving inner-city traffic,” says zu Fürstenberg. Vay’s pragmatic solution is already working in the transition period.
Vay drivers can see the entire area around the car on three screens with a 360-degree perspective – and control them remotely using the steering wheel and accelerator pedal.
(Photo: Friederike Reuter (Vay Technology))
Robert Lacher also believes that Vay can also play a role: “We believe in a step-by-step development towards fully autonomous driving, in which telephoning is the key technology as an already functioning entry point,” he says.
For Lacher, the question of location is also relevant: “The Vay approach is our chance to play at the forefront again in autonomous driving – with a contrary approach to the models from the USA and Asia.”
The German car companies are also trying to gradually approach fully autonomous driving. Most recently, Mercedes was the first vehicle manufacturer to receive “system approval” for highly automated driving from the Federal Motor Transport Authority. He can now offer a technical pilot for the S-Class. The driver can turn away completely from the traffic situation in phases.
Expert expresses doubts about the desired business model
Because Vay is a real deep-tech start-up, i.e. a company that works on complex engineering problems, the euphoria is particularly great. But turning the technology into a viable business model could become an even bigger challenge.
Lennart Dobravsky has doubts that Vay can be successful in the long term. As head of research at the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, he studies developments in the travel and mobility sector.
A remote-controlled taxi service pays off if Vay either offers a better customer experience that justifies higher prices compared to competitors like Free Now, Uber and car sharing services. Or if the company can offer trips at lower costs due to higher occupancy. He considers both to be critical.
“Apart from the exciting moment of the apparently autonomous pick-up, the actual transport is no different than in a current car sharing offer,” says Dobravsky. “The unnecessary search for a parking space should not be underestimated, but I think that customers dig deeper into their pockets for this alone is unrealistic.”
Other application scenarios in industry are conceivable
In addition, the supply of transport services, at least in the metropolises, is already so good that shorter waiting times for customers are hardly feasible – especially with a thinner vehicle fleet, such as Vay will initially have.
Vay could have cost advantages through the efficient use of drivers: Vay’s tele-drivers can ultimately bring other cars from the fleet to the next customer while the customer is idle and driving. But even car sharing services without a driver would have problems operating profitably, says Lennart Dobravsky.
However, he sees potential in other application scenarios, for example in the operation of cranes and other construction machines. “We basically see extreme potential for automation here,” says Dobravsky. That is a dream of the future, but it allows the addressable market to “project into almost infinity”. The Munich start-up Fernride is already working on a solution for trucks.
Von der Ohe and his co-founders firmly believe in end-user service. And investor zu Fürstenberg emphasizes that governments and administrations in particular recognize the benefits of Vays solution. It can be integrated into public transport systems.
The investor says of Vay: “In the long term, the company can use its wealth of data and experience to become an industry leader in the field of fully autonomous driving.”
(Photo: Nik Hunger for Handelsblatt)
In Hamburg, Vay is expected to start with a low double-digit number of vehicles. Interested parties can pre-register as test customers – even in other cities.
In the next step, the company wants to triple its workforce with the help of the fresh capital. Vay currently employs 70 people. The start-up has set aside just under two weeks to train new tele-drivers, including practical and theoretical tests.
More: Podcast with Vay founder Thomas von der Ohe: “A huge advantage when you separate the driver from the vehicle”