That was Chris Urmson's understated assessment of a tiny laser-radar company, Blackmore, that Urmson's startup, Aurora, acquired last year for an undisclosed amount.
The two companies, prior to the acquisition, were also operating in different financial universes. Aurora's most recent funding round was in 2019, for $530 million, bringing the Palo Alto-based firm to a reported $2.5 billion valuation. At Aurora, founded in 2017, Urmson sometimes sounds like Krafcik. Both men speak of an autonomous "driver" as being their focus — a combination of hardware and software that could be installed in any vehicle, like a robot behind the wheel , to replace the human pilot.That brought him to Blackmore.Bob Riha Jr./Reuters
For Aurora's goal of developing a robot driver for Class 8 tractor-trailer rigs, Blackmore's technology is compelling. Although as Urmson put it, Blackmore was "a little off the beaten path;" the company was three years old and the "team has been working on the technology for 15 years." What thrills him about Blackmore is the distance-measuring aspect. "We want that now," is the way he described Aurora's team's reaction to the Blackmore tech when Palo Alto finally met the town of Bozeman, Montana.
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