Tell us a bit about your business? When were you founded, where are you based and how many people do you employ?
Headquarted in Oxford, we (Oxbotica) are a global leader in autonomous vehicle software, with multiple offices spanning the UK and Canada. Since our founding in 2014 by Oxford University professors, Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner, we have cultivated a world-class team of over 170, made up of some of the brightest minds in the industry.
What does the business do?
We’ve focused our efforts on building software for real-world autonomous vehicle applications, drawing on principles of artificial intelligence, robotics and computer vision. For us, it is software that holds the key to unlocking true Universal Autonomy (where any vehicle, at anytime, anywhere in the world can understand where it is, what’s around it and what it should do next). It scales in a way that physical objects don’t, it lowers the barrier to its usage and removes reliance on any and all infrastructure. We are one of the few global providers able to offer a complete autonomous vehicle software stack in a completely modular way.
How is business? What’s the outlook for the year ahead?
The underlying need for autonomy and the huge market potential remains strong. Our software is being used today all around the world – on streets, in quarries, around runways, and down mines – helping to drive efficiencies, increase safety and improve production. In the last fifteen months, our team has more than doubled, expanding from 80 to over 170 and critically we have established a number of critical commercial and technical partnerships including ZF (link here), Navtech (link here) and Cisco (link here). More to come in this domain.
What are the big issues or technological advances that fill you with positivity?
Autonomy is changing the world in so many exciting ways. It allows us to increase safety, reduce costs, save time and even see into the future – predicting hazards before they even happen. What’s really exciting though is when we train machines to teach machines or produce training syllabuses for other software modules to learn from. This is the AI equivalent of giving someone a fishing rod rather than a fish. It’s a fascinating area and is fundamental in allowing us to create a safer, smarter future – by introducing infinite data points for our software to learn from.
Oxbotica CEO, Ozgur Tohumcu
