Ghost Autonomy, a company supported by OpenAI, has ceased operations

Has learned that Ghost Autonomy, a startup specializing in autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has ceased operations.

As of Wednesday, the startup announced on its website that it has ceased operations globally and is in the process of winding down the company. The company had a workforce of approximately 100 individuals and conducted business in Mountain View, Dallas, and Sydney.

“We are proud of the significant technical innovations and progress achieved by the Ghost team in their mission to provide software-defined consumer autonomy,” states the note on its website. The future of profitability seemed uncertain due to the current funding climate and the significant investment needed for autonomy development and commercialization. We are actively considering future destinations for our team’s innovations.

The shutdown occurs merely five months after the startup formed a partnership with OpenAI via the OpenAI Startup Fund, allowing them to have early access to OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft. Additionally, Ghost secured a $5 million investment from OpenAI. Last year, it closed a down round worth $55 million, which involved early investors such as Keith Rabois from Founders Fund and Mike Speiser from Sutter Hill Ventures.

When discussing the company’s future plans, Ghost co-founder and CEO John Hayes emphasized the importance of exploring the potential of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in the field of self-driving vehicles. These AI models have the ability to comprehend both text and images. He claimed that LLMs provided a fresh perspective on “the long tail,” offering logical explanations for intricate scenarios where existing models are lacking. Some experts expressed doubts about the approach.

Similar to many entrepreneurs in the autonomous vehicle industry, Ghost has adapted its strategy over time. The startup, founded in 2017, was originally called Ghost Locomotion. The company entered the public sphere two years later, securing a substantial investment of $63.7 million from prominent investors such as Rabois of Founders Fund, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures, and Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures. Their goal was to create a kit that would enable privately owned passenger vehicles to autonomously navigate highways. The company has announced its plans to deliver that technology in 2020.

Following the passing of that deadline, Ghost secured an additional $100 million in 2021, shifting their focus towards crash prevention technology. The Founders Fund and Coatue were notable participants in the Series D funding round, which Sutter Hill Ventures led. In an interview in 2021, Hayes mentioned that the startup was considering different approaches to their business model. While they hadn’t completely ruled out the consumer kit model, they were currently focusing on developing universal collision avoidance technology to expedite their entry into the market.

According to him, an autonomous driving system could avoid objects without the need to identify and classify them beforehand. The company was instead monitoring the movement of clusters of pixels in a scene. Many other autonomous systems typically start by identifying an object and then utilize image localization to determine its size, distance, and other relevant features. This strategy is employed due to the varying behaviors exhibited by different objects, even when they are of the same size.

Hayes, who was contacted via email on Wednesday, mentioned that the company had finished developing a highway driving product and was now focusing on urban environments for “last-mile delivery.”

“In the end, the necessary funding to bring the product to market could not be secured,” he wrote.