Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup backed by both Ford and Volkswagen, has laid off about 150 employees, as previously reported bloomberg And wall street journal, The move is believed to offset a period of rapid growth in which the company hired more employees than needed.
“With the incredible growth and progress in our mission to deploy driverless vehicles, we are making judicious adjustments to our business plan to best continue on the path to success,” Argo AI said in an emailed statement. Told bloomberg, ledge Argo reached out to AI with a request for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
as noted by WSJ, the layoffs make up about 6 percent of the Pittsburgh-based company’s 2,000-person team. Argo AI was founded in 2016 by Brian Selsky and Peter Rander, Google’s former head of hardware development for autonomous vehicles (AVs), who previously served as the engineering lead for Uber’s self-driving arm. Ford injected $1 billion into the company in 2017 and Volkswagen invested $2.6 billion in 2020.
This funding has allowed the company to build its AV business in several US cities as well as overseas. Argo AI is currently in the process of testing fully autonomous vehicles in Miami and Austin and plans to partner with Lyft in both cities. It is working closely with Walmart to deploy a driverless delivery service in Miami, Austin and Washington, DC, and is working towards its goal of launching an automated rideshare service with Volkswagen in Germany by 2025. Is.