The Spooky Issue 🎃👻🦇💀🕸

Two Ghostly Startups Driving Towards an Autonomous Future

Arteen Zahiri

Published in

Start-up Society

7 min readOct 17, 2023

Welcome to the 117th edition of Start-up Society! Check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here.

Ghostride the Whip! It’s a Bay Area tradition that involves dancing outside of a moving car. But what if we could ghostride the whip in a different (and safer) way?

We are back just in time for some Halloween fun. In the spirit of the spooky season, we’re taking a look at two autonomous vehicle startups with names that would make Casper the Friendly Ghost proud: Ghost Autonomy and Phantom Auto.

These two Bay Area startups are making self-driving cars affordable and accessible to everyone and revolutionizing the way we transport goods and people.

Ghost Autonomy

HQ: Mountain View, CA

Founded: 2017

Employees: 146 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Ghost is on a mission to make self-driving for everyone. The startup is building autonomous driving software for automakers, based on a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that makes highway autonomy safe and scalable for the consumer car market.
The company’s approach differs from other self-driving car startups in that it does not rely on expensive hardware like lidar and radar. Ghost uses smartphone-grade cameras, radars, and ultrasonic sensors mounted on the exterior of vehicles to enable autonomous driving capabilities. This is a more cost-effective approach compared to those expensive lidar sensors.

Ghost’s goal is to develop a universal autonomy system that can be installed on any existing vehicle. The company’s software is designed to be flexible and scalable, so that it can be used in a variety of vehicles, from cars and trucks to delivery robots and forklifts.
Ghost completed a $100 million Series D funding round in 2021. The company is backed by investors including Coatue, Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures, Keith Rabois at Founders Fund, and Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.

MEET THE TEAM

John Hayes, Founder & CEO

Prior to Ghost, John founded Pure Storage, taking the company public (NYSE: PSTG) in 2015. Pure succeeded by using software to achieve near-perfect reliability and re-defining simplicity and efficiency with commodity consumer hardware.
As chief architect at Pure, he leveraged the transition to flash to re-imagine data center storage, creating high-performance storage solutions run by some of the world’s largest cloud providers, financial services institutions, healthcare providers, and governments.
An engineer by trade, John graduated from The University of Guelph in 2000 with a B.Sc. in Engineering Systems and Computing.

Volkmar Uhlig, Co-Founder & AI and Science Advisor

Volkmar is an accomplished computer scientist with two decades of experience building high-performance, real-time computing systems. He served as the CTO of Ghost until this year, when he transitioned to VP of AI Infrastructure at IBM.
In his previous roles as Co-Founder & CTO at Adello and Architect at Teza Technologies, he created artificial intelligence systems for real-time applications in high-frequency trading and digital media.
Volkmar began his career at IBM Watson Research and earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. He received his Masters in Computer Science from TU Dresden.

Abhinav Das, CTO

Abhinav joined Ghost as a founding engineer and has led key development efforts across the in-car runtime stack, vehicle integration, and driving program.
Previously, Abhinav helped launch the Argo Project at Applatix (acquired by Intuit), a flourishing open-source, container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes. Before that, he was a member of the technical staff at Pure Storage, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.
He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai in India.

START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Ghost has a very noble mission: to democratize autonomous driving. Pricey sensors and high-end computers mean self-driving will likely make its debut in cars and SUVs that cost around $100,000 or more. Ghost Autonomy wants to deliver autonomy to $30,000 vehicles.
With its cost-effective approach, Ghost’s system is expected to cost just $1,500 — less than many buyers spend on an upgraded sound system. However, it might not cost anything upfront. The product is designed to be a subscription service with a ballpark cost of somewhere between $100 to $200 per month. Not bad compared to what Tesla charges for the still not fully functional Full Self-Driving package ($199 a month).
Get ready to ghostride your Toyota Prius. Ghost says mainstream automakers will be able to start integrating its software and hardware by early 2024, and the software will evolve into a hands-off, eyes-closed system with lane changing by the end of 2024. By 2025, Ghost hopes to also have the system working on rural roads for a complete, hands-off, eyes-closed, exit-to-exit experience.

GO DEEPER

Ghost Autonomy Wants to Use Smartphone Cameras to Crack Autonomous Driving

Exclusive: Why Ghost Is the Biggest Player in Autonomy You’ve Never Heard Of

Ghost raises $100M Series D for autonomous driving and crash prevention tech

Phantom Auto

HQ: South San Francisco, CA

Founded: 2017

Employees: 153 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Phantom Auto specializes in providing remote driving solutions, enabling drivers to safely and efficiently operate vehicles from anywhere in the world. Their technology can be applied to a variety of industries, including logistics, trucking, and autonomous ride-hailing.

The platform looks like the video game Mario Kart — a forklift operator sits at a computer and uses a miniature steering wheel and pedals to commandeer the machine remotely. Workers have real-time, 360-degree views of their surroundings, and can communicate with staff on the ground with two-way audio.
Phantom’s vehicle-agnostic remote operation software enables highly-trained operators to remotely monitor, remotely assist, and remotely operate fleets of unmanned vehicles from thousands of miles away.
In April 2023, the company raised $25 million from infrastructure investment firm InfraBridge, via its portfolio company ConGlobal, a major rail terminal operator with a fleet of 700 yard trucks. Phantom Auto has a pre-funding valuation of $500 million, according to sources familiar, and has raised $95 million to date.

MEET THE TEAM

Shai Magzimof, Co-Founder & CEO

Before Phantom Auto, Shai founded his first company at age 17 while participating in Y-combinator. That company later became Cue and was acquired by Apple.
At age 20, Shai founded Nextpeer, a real-time multiplayer mobile gaming social platform, which had over 180 million downloads before it was acquired by Viber. Shai served as Head of Games at Viber for two years.

Elliot Katz, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer

Prior to co-founding Phantom Auto, Elliot served as Partner and Global Chair of the Connected and Automated Vehicle Practice at McGuireWoods LLP.
Previously, Elliot spent 6 years at DLA Piper, where he advised automakers, global technology companies, and municipalities on emerging issues in the mobility space.
Elliot earned his Doctor of Law (JD) from Cornell Law School. He graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University.

Nils Alstad, Chief Product Officer

Nils joined Phantom Auto in 2021, initially as the VP of Product and Customer Success before quickly working his way up to CPO.
Prior to Phantom Auto, he was the VP of Customer Experience at CANVAS Technology, a robotics company with a mission to provide end-to-end autonomous delivery of goods.
After CANVAS was acquired by Amazon in 2019, Nils was a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon Robotics for two years.
Nils is an alum of The University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

You’re probably thinking, why the need for human intervention? Why not just be fully autonomous? Phantom Auto’s Elliot Katz explains human involvement, even from great distances, is a key factor in smooth and safe operation.

“Remotely operated vehicles are powered by a combination of remote operation software and the human brain. We are keeping the human in the loop by design, rather than attempting to fully replace humans with autonomy that is not capable of handling the full driving task, by deploying technology that is a co-pilot and force multiplier for humans — who have been operating vehicles for as long as vehicles have existed — we have a technological solve for the labor shortage that is viable today, not decades from now.” — Elliot Katz

Tackling the labor shortage is massive. A key feature of the platform is the ability for drivers to switch between vehicles, even when they’re in different facilities. That could be a boon for warehouse managers contending with labor shortages — in theory, they could have employees working from anywhere.