INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
DoorDash has been on an acquisition tear of late, with Scotty Labs as its latest target
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this comes after DoorDash acquired Caviar in a deal worth $410 million.Scotty Labs, a
tele-operations company that is working on technology to enable people to remotely control self-driving cars, raised a $6 million seed round
from Gradient Ventures, with participation from Horizon Ventures and Hemi Ventures, last March
another company that had built tech to create high-resolution maps for autonomous driving using crowdsourced imagery and computer vision to
merge and process the images
Instead, startup Mapillary obtained that trove of hundreds of millions of images.DoorDash would not comment on what the new hires are
working on, but through its robot pilots and partnership with GM, the startup has made no secret of its interest in exploring autonomous
technology, specifically looking at how it can improve the cost and efficiency of deliveries, and it would make sense that it would also
want to have in-house expertise to own and manage those projects.DoorDash has experimented with delivery robots before
In 2017, DoorDash partnered with both Starship Technologies and Marble to test food delivery via robot
DoorDash is also beefing up its in-house team of autonomous and navigation specialists.This investment in autonomous tech through its
acquisition of Scotty Labs and acqui-hire of the team from Lvl5 comes at a time when DoorDash says it is revamping its policies around
driver wages.The enthusiasm and potential of autonomous tech had led to startups creating literally dozens of interesting products that
focus on different aspects of this field
We have heard it tried to merge with Postmates
It bought Caviar this summer
And it has raised an absolute ton of money
Just this month, the company received the first permit to deploy autonomous delivery bots in San Francisco.As technology becomes a key way
