Argo AI, an autonomous automobile startup backed by each Ford and Volkswagen, has laid off about 150 employees, as reported earlier by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. The transfer is meant to offset a interval of fast progress, through which the corporate employed extra employees than wanted.
“With incredible growth and progress made in our mission to deploy driverless vehicles, we are making prudent adjustments to our business plan to best continue on a path for success,” Argo AI mentioned in an emailed assertion obtained by Bloomberg. The Verge reached out to Argo AI with a request for remark however didn’t instantly hear again.
As famous by the WSJ, the layoffs make up about 6 % of the Pittsburgh-based firm’s 2,000-person crew. Argo AI was based in 2016 by Bryan Salesky, the previous head of {hardware} improvement for Google’s autonomous automobiles (AVs), and Peter Rander, who beforehand served as an engineering lead for Uber’s self-driving department. Ford injected $1 billion into the corporate in 2017, and Volkswagen adopted up with a $2.6 billion funding in 2020.
“Argo is a critical partner of our self-driving service, and we will continue to support them and work together on developing the self-driving technology that will power our self-driving service,” Ford spokesperson Bradley Carroll mentioned in a press release to The Verge.
This funding has allowed the corporate to construct out its AV enterprise in a number of US cities in addition to abroad. Argo AI is presently within the means of testing totally autonomous automobiles in Miami and Austin and plans on partnering with Lyft in each cities. It’s additionally teaming up with Walmart to deploy a driverless supply service in Miami, Austin, and Washington, D.C., and is working in direction of its aim of launching an automatic rideshare service with Volkswagen in Germany by 2025.
Update July tenth, 4:19PM ET: Updated so as to add a press release from a Ford spokesperson.
