Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned. These deadhead miles — an industry term for miles driven without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robotaxi companies and profitability.
Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a fix: parking space-sized automated pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for the robotaxi industry. And the idea has caught the attention of investors.
Aseon Labs has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital also participated, along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.
Aseon Labs is still in the early stages. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.
“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up,” Kalligeros told TechCrunch. “You need the robotaxi in continuous o …