A hot Seattle startup developing autonomous driving technology for off-road vehicles announced a $10 million seed round to fuel its growth.
It’s the latest milestone for Overland AI, the University of Washington spinout aiming to help companies — and the U.S. military — use ground vehicles in complex terrain without the need for a human driver.
Last month Overland announced that it won a two-year contract worth up to $18.6 million with the U.S. Army and Defense Innovation Unit to develop its OverDrive technology platform for the U.S. Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle. Other recipients include top defense tech companies Anduril and Palantir.
“Our mission is to eliminate risk to humans by using robot-controlled vehicles for high-risk situations,” Overland CEO Byron Boots said in a statement. “There is no reason to risk a soldier’s life when a robot can do the job just as well.”
Overland AI appears to have found a niche as some self-driving companies struggle to make substantial headway, at least on traditional streets. GM-backed Cruise recently halted tests and laid off employees; Argo AI shut down in 2022; and Apple ditched its own autonomous vehicle efforts.
But even as funding to autonomous vehicle startups slows, some startups such as Overland and London’s Wayve are still attracting attention from venture capital investors.
Founded in 2022, Overland is also working with the U.S. Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA, a unit of the Department of Defense.
Speaking at the GeekWire Summit last year, Boots recounted how self-driving technology’s roots started with military-related applications.
“Defense was the original motivator for this technology,” he said.
Overland’s tech can be installed on any vehicle and is designed to navigate around various conditions at different speeds. It uses advanced machine learning capabilities to analyze surrounding terrain in real time with only onboard sensing (cameras, LIDAR, etc.) and compute. The tech does not rely on GPS and can avoid detection.
Boots is a highly regarded robotics researcher who is the principal investigator of the UW RACER team, one of three research groups involved with DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) competition. Overland recently was selected to continue development as part of the competition.
Boots earned a PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University, a leading robotics research institution. He then spent two years at the UW as a postdoc scholar and later became an assistant professor at Georgia Tech.
In 2019 Boots returned to the UW, where he is currently the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Boots is also director of the UW’s Robot Learning Laboratory and co-chairs the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Robot Learning. He previously was a principal research scientist at NVIDIA Research’s Seattle Robotics Lab.
The company’s CTO, Jonathan Fink, worked as a researcher for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for more than a decade. He earned a PhD in electrical systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Overland’s other two co-founders are Stephanie Bonk, president, and Greg Okopal, COO. Bonk previously worked at Apple and PROS. Okopal has more than a decade of experience working on lage defense research programs.
Overland has a team of 27 people who worked for Google, Waymo, Aurora Innovation, and other top self-driving companies.
Point72 Ventures, which recently expanded to Seattle, led the seed round. Other investors include Shasta Ventures, Ascend, Pioneer Square Labs, Voyager Capital, and Cubit Capital.
Overland was a finalist for Startup of the Year at the recent GeekWire Awards.
The company competes with several others developing off-road autonomous tech, including Forterra, Polymath Robotics, Potential Motors, and more startups.
