Leo Drive Receives Funding from TIER IV to Accelerate Growth
Istanbul, October 20, 2022 — Leo Drive, the leading full-stack autonomous vehicle technology startup in Turkey, announced a seed round investment from the Japanese autonomous vehicle technology leader TIER IV.
TIER IV and Leo Drive have been collaborating for many years in various activities, including project co-creation, joint business development efforts, and, most importantly, participation in the Autoware* project, the world’s leading open-source software project for autonomous driving.
TIER IV is a founding member of the Autoware Foundation, of which Leo Drive is a premium member and a core contributor in the past years, Leo Drive ramped up its participation in the Autoware project and redefined its company strategy around the open-source development best practices.
Leo Drive provides end-to-end autonomous vehicle technology development expertise to OEMs, Tier 1s, and any potential user of self-driving technologies. Leo Drive’s innovative business model enables customers to rapidly and cost-consciously prototype autonomous solutions for their use cases with an open-source approach, which provides complete transparency, predictability, and flexibility. Leo Drive has already completed several OEM projects developing autonomous driving solutions from scratch, and several national and international OEM projects are in the pipeline.
Besides the turnkey solutions, Leo Drive has been working on shippable, software-enabled hardware products in the autonomous vehicle domain, namely, various sensor suites that work in harmony with the Autoware project, to address the need of the market: a coherent, easy-to-use, and benchmarked product that is instrumental in autonomous use-case concept validation.
Part of the seed funding will be used to grow the project development team to enhance Leo Drive’s bandwidth for upcoming projects. The rest of the funding will be used to mature Leo Drive’s product offerings by creating a separate product team and strengthening the corporate management to sustain high growth in the following stages of Leo Drive’s journey.
With this investment, TIER IV and Leo Drive signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which states that both parties jointly agree to strengthen the current partnership and collaboration, as well as to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and experience for promoting, developing and optimizing Autoware-based products and services.
*Autoware is the trademark of the Autoware Foundation.
About Leo Drive
Leo Drive is an experienced full-stack autonomous vehicle company developing scalable and reliable autonomous vehicle solutions. Leo Drive’s solutions enable vehicle manufacturers to adopt autonomous vehicle technology for their platforms quickly and cost-efficiently while bringing significant improvement in autonomous technology development methodology with our transparent and open-source approach.
The company focuses on a co-creation and design-win mentality to ensure the customer’s autonomous vehicle fleets operate per their application requirements. The company also provides off-the-shelf hardware and software products for autonomous use-case explorers to experiment with vehicle automation.
Leo Drive’s value proposition is based on the experience gathered from our customer projects. We design, develop and integrate both software and hardware, thus, providing a complete solution for autonomous technology adoption.
About TIER IV
TIER IV is the creator of Autoware, the world’s first open-source software for autonomous driving, and provides full-stack solutions for the commercialization of intelligent vehicles based on the Autoware-defined Autonomous Driving Kit (ADK), which runs on multiple platforms. Autoware is currently used by hundreds of companies globally, with field operation tests run in about 20 countries and implemented with 30 different types of vehicles.
As a founding member of the Autoware Foundation, TIER IV is dedicated to providing open access to autonomous driving technology so that everyone, from individuals to organizations, can participate in and contribute to a sustainable ecosystem of intelligent vehicles and autonomous driving technology for the benefit of society.
Media Contact:
Leo Drive — Samet Kütük (Co-Founder / CTO) — samet@leodrive.ai
