EVwire brief: Aseon Labs, a Redwood City, California startup, has raised $10 million to attack a cost that quietly drags on robotaxi economics: the unpaid miles a car logs shuttling to and from distant lots for a charge, a clean, and a once-over. Its answer is a compact servicing pod, about the size of a parking spot, meant to be dropped in clusters around a city so cars get serviced near where they actually carry riders.
Crane Venture Partners led the round. Expa, the firm of Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, joined alongside Y Combinator, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital, plus a roster of angels, among them former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury chief Immad Akhund, and Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri.
Here's Y Combinator's post on LinkedIn:
Co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros frames the problem as one of utilization.
"In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing [...] you need the utilization to go up. You need the robotaxi in continuous operation during the entirety of the demand curve of the day."
Aseon’s render of an in-situ station
A pod carries cameras to look the car over, a robotic arm to tidy the cabin and grab anything a passenger left behind, and a charger, so a robotaxi can top up and get cleaned without peeling off to a depot. Because each unit counts as a temporary structure rather than a permanent build, Aseon can skip the long permitting slog and lift a pod out and move it when a spot isn't pulling its weight.
For power, a unit can run off its own propane generator or another mobile source, or tap the grid where Aseon strikes deals with charging providers. The plan is for the pods to run on their own, though the first ones out will have a person on site.
With the new money, Aseon plans to put five prototype pods together, roughly double its team from six people to around twelve, and lock in sites for an early network. No robotaxi operator has signed on yet, though Kalligeros says the interest is there, with most players keen to give it a try.
Aseon’s stations are designed to be unmanned
Context:
Neither founder comes from the self-driving world. Kalligeros did mechanical design work at Bentley and Tesla, and in 2016 he and Aseon COO Dan Keene started Pushme, a venture that built battery-swap stations for shared micromobility fleets. Tier Mobility bought the company in early 2020. By Y Combinator's account, Pushme reached over 5,000 sites in 40 markets, and the pair reckon that same build-it-everywhere model carries over to robotaxis.
Those empty miles add up to a real drag on the bottom line. A car heading off to charge or get wiped down earns nothing on the way, and the lots where that work happens usually sit well away from the busy core, since cheap land and rider demand rarely share a zip code.
Today most fleets route cars to centralized depots and outside partners for cleaning, charging, and upkeep. Waymo, for one, handed its Dallas fleet servicing to Avis. Aseon is wagering that a spread of small, relocatable pods keeps more cars earning across more of the day.
Source: TechCrunch, Aseon Labs, and Y Combinator on LinkedIn.
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