Pittsburgh-based autonomous truck startup Locomation, founded by Tekin Meriçli and Çetin Meriçli, has completed its new investment round, including ScaleX Ventures.
ScaleX Ventures, a venture capital fund that prioritizes investing in high-tech startups, invested in Locomation, an autonomous truck startup founded by two Turkish brothers Tekin Meriçli and Çetin Meriçli, who are graduates of Carnegie Mellon. In addition to ScaleX Ventures, global investors such as SaaS Ventures, Homebrew, AV10 Ventures, Plug & Play took part in the investment tour, in which more than 8 institutional investors participated.
Locomation, which received a seed investment of 2018 million dollars in 5.5, allows the driver to be a driver on only one of the two trucks traveling in convoy with the "Autonomous Relay Convoy" (ARCTM) technology and the journey is completed by following the truck in the front. This technology, developed by the Locomation team, completely eliminates all accidents involving trucks and provides a high level of cost efficiency for its customers.
"OUR GOAL IS TO CREATE A UNICORN WITH THE LOCOMATION TEAM"
Stating that the autonomous truck has already started to take its place among the technologies of the future and made an assessment on the subject, ScaleX Founding Partner Dilek Dayınlarlı said, “We expect semi-autonomous vehicles to become widespread in the short term in the transition period when unmanned autonomous vehicles will not be available for a long time. Locomation also demonstrated its success by creating a revolution with its first commercial agreement in this field. We are proud to be the first Turkish fund to invest in autonomous vehicles with Locomation, which produces technologies that can be implemented immediately, and we aim to create a unicorn that will make a name in the world in a short time ”.
THE FIRST LARGE-SCALE COMMERCIAL AUTONOMOUS TRUCK AGREEMENT IN HISTORY
The Locomation team, which made the first commercial autonomous vehicle agreement in history with Wilson Logistics in recent months, will equip a minimum of 2022 trucks under Wilson Logistics management with the groundbreaking "Autonomous Relay Convoy" (ARCTM) technology, starting from 1120. On the other hand, Locomation, which signed a strategic partnership agreement with NVIDIA, will use the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin platform on its trucks starting from 2022. Capable of processing more than 200 trillion transactions per second, Orin has approximately 7 times higher performance than the previous generation Xavier SoC platform.
Locomation CEO Çetin Meriçli, an experienced entrepreneur and former faculty member at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, has nearly 20 years of experience in developing complex robotic systems for commercial and military applications, took part in the robotics project. Tekin Meriçli, CTO of the company, also worked as a commercialization specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and published over 40 articles in the field of robotics and computer science.
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