Exciting News from Scotty Labs!
12 years ago, a Nigerian and a Pakistani immigrated to the United States. A decade later, they founded a company in Silicon Valley, backed by some of the most iconic investors in the country, and went on to recruit a diverse team that hailed from places like Russia, Nigeria, India, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Brooklyn, and Boston. That team of diverse folks then went on to build some of the most important technologies of our generation and got acquired by one of the fastest growing companies in San Francisco! If that’s not a great story, I don’t know what is.
I’m excited to announce that Scotty Labs has been acquired by DoorDash!
The beginning
Almost 3 years ago, Usman and I embarked on a journey together to solve a problem that we both considered to be deeply interesting and important to the world. We set out to build some of the most important pieces of technology and a product that would transform the logistics industry for the better.
We have been pretty quiet about our journey over the years so I would like to take this time to provide some context on what we had been up to leading up to this acquisition.
People
First, we knew that we had an incredibly hard mission ahead of us, so we spent a lot of time and energy building one of the best and most passionate teams in the autonomous driving space. Our team had seven PHD’s with prior research in everything from Electrical Engineering to Quantum Physics. Our people had also worked at companies like Apple, SRI International, Cruise Automation, Google, NASA and more. Our team worked tirelessly and effectively, and showed more heart than I have ever seen (and I have worked with some deeply passionate teams in the past) and we could not have had this incredible outcome without the efforts of every single member of our team (thank you!).
Product
Our core belief at Scotty has always been that Autonomy + Remote Assistance will be the future of logistics.We have intentionally always considered ourselves to be the anti-hype company and focused intensely on developing core infrastructure and algorithms, with a healthy degree of human intelligence, to ensure the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles.
Our team has done bold things, from remotely driving a car around San Francisco:
To autonomously (level 2) driving a truck at 4am in California:
What’s next?
We’ll share more updates in the near future but for now, we’re really excited to be part of the amazing DoorDash family and looking forward to building something magical together. Thank you all for tuning in to the journey so far.
Beam Up!
Tobenna, Usman, and the Scotty Labs Team.
P.S. Thanks to all of our investors including SRI International, Gradient (Google AI Fund), Horizons, Hemi, and others. To our amazing angel investors who took time out of their busy days and nights to provide much needed advice and guidance, a special thank you to David Sacks, Qasar Younis, Rob May, Evan Moore, Immad Akhund, Pete Kazanjy and others.
