Autonomous vehicles are having a moment, and it’s making it a lot easier for smaller companies to raise money. Vay, a German startup offering remote-controlled rental cars, will get $60 million in cash from Singaporean tech heavyweight Grab, the company announced on Monday.
The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close by the end of the year, may be followed by “an additional $350M as joint milestones are achieved within the first year,” Vay CEO Thomas von der Ohe wrote on LinkedIn.
The Berlin-based startup uses its technology and human operators to remotely drive rental cars to and from customers. Vay isn’t yet commercially deployed in real traffic in Germany, where it lacked regulatory clarity until recently, but the company is currently operational in Las Vegas, where it in January 2024. Vay now plans to use Grab’s investments to scale and expand its operations in the U.S.
Vay will need to hit certain milestones in the US to unlock additional investment from Grab, including number of U.S. cities covered, regulatory approvals obtained, and overall consumer revenue.
The U.S. is seeing increased competition and fast-expanding offerings of various forms of remote driving. For instance, Alphabet-owned Waymo recently announced it would deploy its robotaxi service in Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego.
Although publicly traded on the Nasdaq, Grab does not operate in the U.S., where it will limit itself to supporting Vay’s growth.
However, Vay describes driverless car rental as complementary to robotaxis. As for Grab, it sees Vay as serving “a growing segment of consumers who prefer not to be car owners,” Grab cofounder and CEO Anthony Tan said in a press release.
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Vay’s customers may not be car owners, but they still need a driving license: once the car gets delivered, the user takes over and drives it like a regular car. But unlike their own car, they don’t need to find where to park it. Vay says its service costs about half the price of ride-hailing, thanks to this hybrid approach and hardware-light system.
At the same time, the two companies plan to explore synergies between Vay’s and Grab’s business in Southeast Asia. Calling itself “the everyday everything app,” Grab’s ubiquitous super-app offers all-in-one taxi, ride hailing, transport, express grocery shopping and food delivery options, as well as digital payments and financial services.
With a growing interest in mobility, Grab recently invested in autonomous driving tech startups including May Mobility out of the U.S. and WeRide out of China. The synergies it finds with Vay may well be on the tech side — for instance, it said that driving data collected by Vay could accelerate the training of AI models to improve autonomous driving.
This also aligns with Vay’s vision to become more than an electric rental car fleet. The company has already expanded into commercial and business-to-business services, and closed a partnership with self-driving truck company Kodiak Robotics. Ultimately, it aims to build a “global remote driving platform,” von der Ohe told TechCrunch earlier this year.
According to Crunchbase, Vay had raised $131.8 million from backers including Kinnevik, Coatue, Eurazeo, Atomico, General Catalyst, Creandum, and the European Investment Bank. If fully unlocked, Grab’s investment would be a significant turbo. But with Nvidia announcing plans to invest $500 million into British self-driving tech startup Wayve, the race is only starting.
