Per previous GM Authority coverage from November 2023, former Cruise CEO and Co-Founder Kyle Vogt resigned from the autonomous driving subsidiary amidst fallout surrounding the October 2023 incident where a pedestrian was unintentionally trapped and dragged underneath a Cruise AV unit after being struck by a human-driven vehicle. Now, Vogt has announced that he has co-founded a new robotics company.
Via a post to social media, Vogt revealed that he has launched a robotics company with two business partners. Although details surrounding this new company are mute at the moment, Vogt claims that they’ll be building robots to assist in chores, and that they’ve raised roughly $150 million in funding from investors and entrepreneurs.
“So many things compete for our time – commutes, longer working hours, and the complexities of modern life,” Vogt remarked online. “Our team has spent years building robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we’re taking that a step further with this company.”
Kyle Vogt (middle)
As a reminder, Vogt’s resignation as Cruise CEO sparked a cascade of additional resignations, including Cruise Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) Daniel Kan and Cruise Autonomous Vehicle Platforms Senior Vice President Carl Jenkins.
Beyond that, a number of Cruise executives were fired in December 2023.
In regard to what created all this Cruise-related turmoil, the aforementioned October 2023 subjected the self-driving company to various repercussions, including an NHTSA investigation and California DMV driverless permit suspension. In response, Cruise suspended all robotaxi rides – both manual and supervised – and also issued a recall to update its collision detection system.
It’s worth noting that Cruise just recently relaunched its autonomous driving operations in Phoenix, Arizona. Moving forward, the supervised autonomous driving is currently expected to begin in Phoenix and then gradually expand to the Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler areas after safety benchmarks are reached.
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