Minus Zero raises USD 1.5 mn funding from angel investors

The country's first self-driving vehicle startup Minus Zero on Monday said it has received USD 1.5-million funding from a group of angel investors, including JITO Angel Network (JAN).

The network, which claims to be the only global community-based Angel network in India, has been boosting the funding ecosystem for early-stage innovative start-ups in the country with a funding of around Rs 47 crore in fresh as well as follow-on investments in as many as 28 startup companies during last fiscal, it said.

Led by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero is building affordable, fully-autonomous vehicle fleets that are capable of fully driverless manoeuvres in unstructured and disorganized traffic scenarios.

Although the driverless car market is in the early stages, the amount of activity that has happened in this space over the past few years makes it a promising space, said Sunil Kumar Singhvi, vice chairman, JAN.

''There is huge untapped potential within India that Minus Zero can tap in the coming years. Its focus on not just building a proprietary technology but ensuring that the end product is affordable to Indian users is what makes Minus Zero all the more interesting,'' Singhvi added.

Minus Zero recently became the first company to test a fully driverless prototype live on Indian public roads, as per the release.

''With multiple patents in the pipeline, our proprietary approach towards self-driving mimics human intuition giving the software an ability to gain confident insights even with lesser data inputs,” said Reehal, CEO and CTO at Minus Zero. PTI IAS DRR