Cruisin' and Snoozin'
Emailed on September 13th, 2019 in The Friday Forward
Voyage, an autonomous ride-hail startup focused on retirement communities, raised $31 million in Series B funding. Franklin Templeton led, and was joined by Khosla Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, and the VC arm of Jaguar Land Rover.
The Palo Alto, California-based company, spun out of online university Udacity in 2017, has raised a total of $52 million to date.
That’s a fraction of the billions of dollars invested in R&D by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise and Uber, but Voyage has been building up real-world experience ferrying riders in low-speed autonomous vehicles for two years in programs at The Villages retirement communities in San Jose and central Florida, near Orlando.
Large-scale retirement communities are relatively controlled environments, typically with lower posted speeds and many residents who are no longer able to drive themselves, making Voyage’s on-demand automated vans a good fit.
Who would've thought? It's your grandparents, not the millenials, setting the trend.