Robotaxis drive miles just to clean and charge; This new startup wants to fix that

Take a stroll around San Francisco, and it doesn’t take long to see an empty, self-driving car roaming the city streets, waiting to be called by a passenger or heading to a remote warehouse to be charged and cleaned. These mileage — an industry term meaning miles traveled without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robo-taxi companies and profitability.

Redwood City, Calif.-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a solution: robotic pods the size of a parking space that could be deployed throughout cities to inspect, clean and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls it the robotic stops of the robo-taxi industry. The idea caught the attention of investors.

Asean Laboratories TechCrunch has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. Y Combinator, venture firm Expa, Uber co-founder, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital also participated, along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google CEO Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Imad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.

Aseon Labs is still in the early stages. The seed money will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow the six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Calligros.

“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing services — which is what we need to achieve with self-driving cars — and stop actually subsidizing the cost, we need to increase usage,” Calligros told TechCrunch. “You need a robotaxi that runs continuously through the entire demand curve of the day.”

Aseon’s idea is that a network of distributed autonomous pods would reduce miles traveled, inevitably turning robot taxi services into profitable enterprises.

Calligeros and co-founder and COO Dan Kane come from outside the world of self-driving vehicles. But they bring experience in developing and scaling a hardware and real estate company. Calligeros worked as a mechanical design engineer at Bentley Motors and Tesla before he and Ken founded Pushme in 2016 to build battery swapping infrastructure for micromobility fleets. Pushme was building a battery swap network in Europe when it was acquired by Tier Mobility in January 2020.

“The parallel I would draw is that we were essentially tasked by SoftBank to put this in as many markets as it made sense for Tier within a very short, compressed period of time,” Calligeros said. “The rules of the game became: How can we deploy sites downtown, where it makes sense, but at the same time, make it easy to deploy them as non-permanent infrastructure?”

Aseon Labs applies the same thinking to autonomous vehicles.

While researching the industry, the duo visited autonomous vehicle depots, where fleets of robotaxis are inspected, maintained, cleaned and shipped. The cost of real estate often drives companies to locate these depots outside the city center, where most passenger transportation activity takes place.

“Warehouse infrastructure is the basic requirement for launching a new city for any autonomous vehicle operator,” he said. “And what’s happening in the warehouse now — which is the operational backbone of autonomy — is not completely complete.”

The founders settled on the idea of ​​creating smaller, independently powered autonomous pods that could be distributed throughout the city, but more importantly, could also be moved as needed. The units, which include cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interior parts, are temporary structures. This classification helps Aseon Labs avoid a lengthy permitting process and allows the company to move units in the event of poor site performance.

The units are designed to run on a propane generator for power or connect to an existing power source through partnerships with electric vehicle charging companies. It is intended to operate autonomously, although early versions will be staffed, according to Calligeros.

Aseon Labs isn’t trying to address every edge case, either. Instead, it relies on computer vision and artificial intelligence — specifically the models of vision, language and movement common in modern robots — to detect problems the pod shouldn’t be trying to solve. For example, if the camera detects melted chocolate on the back seat, the robotic arm stops because trying to clean it could make the stain worse. Instead, the vehicle will be shipped and sent directly to the company’s central warehouse for human handling.

Aseon Labs has not signed contracts with any robotaxi companies yet, but Calligeros said there is widespread interest in the concept. “Almost everyone wants to try it,” he added.