Voyage Snags $31 Million As It Targets A Self-Driving Niche: Retirement Communities

Voyage, a Silicon Valley self-driving vehicle startup focused on using the technology to provide transportation at retirement communities, has landed $31 million of new funding to expand its robotic fleet and engineering team. 

Led by 31-year-old CEO and cofounder Oliver Cameron, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, Voyage said Franklin Templeton was the lead investor in its Series B round, which was also backed by Khosla Ventures and Jaguar Land-Rover and Chevron tech investment funds. The Palo Alto, California-based company, spun out of online university Udacity in 2017, has raised a total of $52 million to date. 

That’s a fraction of the billions of dollars invested in R&D by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, General Motors’ Cruise and Uber, but Voyage has been building up real-world experience ferrying riders in low-speed autonomous vehicles for two years in programs at The Villages retirement communities in San Jose and central Florida, near Orlando. That particular niche market aligns with where the technology is at the moment, Cameron says. 

“A zero-to 25-mph self-driving car—we believe that problem is very, very solvable. The zero-to-65-mph self-driving car will take more time, so we’re trying to deliver on this really critical promise of self-driving cars by finding a solvable problem,” he says. “We really want to focus our time on the places or the people that desperately need something better.”

The technical complexity of offering self-driving robotaxi services in urban markets is on a longer-than-anticipated path to commercialization, leading driverless tech developers to seek nearer-term revenue opportunities. Companies like Waymo, which operates a limited robotaxi service in suburban Phoenix mainly with human drivers at the wheel, TuSimple and Embark see automated trucks as one early option, while Nuro, Postmates and others see low-speed delivery robots as a viable application.

For Voyage, senior communities are an attractive niche that aligns with the current level of self-driving capability.

Large-scale retirement communities are relatively controlled environments, typically with lower posted speeds and many residents who are no longer able to drive themselves, making Voyage’s on-demand automated vans a good fit, Cameron says. Like self-driving vehicles operated by competitors, Voyage’s fleet of plug-in Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans, the model Waymo also uses, are loaded with computers, digital cameras, radar and laser lidar sensors to see and navigate the world, but it only runs them at speeds of up to 25 mph. (For now, it’s also keeping backup human drivers at the wheel, who can assist elderly riders getting in and out of vans.)

“We do take people from their doorstep to any other doorstep and as long as that speed doesn’t exceed 25 miles an hour and can handle unprotected left turns, roundabouts, all-way or two-way intersections, lane changes, all that sort of stuff,” Cameron says.

Over the next year, it will use the new funds to significantly expand its current fleet of a dozen vehicles and shift to a third-generation model that will be more cost-effective, though Cameron declined to elaborate. He also refrained from discussing the company’s revenue and what it plans to charge for its ride services.

“The company has made some incredible hires which have been instrumental in enabling the development of Voyage’s state-of-the-art technology,” said Sebastian Peck, managing director of Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures. “They’ve shown us that they have the capability to quickly make self-driving, autonomous taxis in residential communities a reality, sooner than anyone would have thought.”

Broader applications of its ride service and operating speeds of up to 65 mph will come as the company’s technical proficiency expands and its vehicles, software and sensors improve.

“We are all about building a business on the back of the technology,” he says. “I think the days of self-driving as a science project should be over.”