Regular Techzim readers probably remember the article on Pasi William Sachiti, a Zimbabwean entrepreneur based in the UK who, less than a month ago, launched a crowdfunding campaign for his self-driving car startup.
Sachiti and team have achieved the amazing feat of not only raising the target £300,000 they were looking for, but they are also now able to raise more than they set out to, called ‘overfunding’ on CrowdCube.
As of the writing of this article, Kar-Go has raised £302,830 so far. This is equivalent to about US $390,000. The startup still has 15 days of fundraising to go, and considering they are still getting takers, the total investment figure when they eventually close the campaign is likely to be much higher.
Kar-Go announced on the achievement on their CrowdCube page yesterday:
Today, we’re very excited to announce that our campaign has just passed the 100% mark!
Huge thank you to the 200+ investors and an anchor investor who have collectively backed us to the tune of £300,000.
As we reached our target, we will be closing off our campaign in the next couple of days! If you or any of your colleagues are still speaking with us regarding investment, please get in touch so that we can wrap things include you in the round before it closes!
The successful crowdfunding campaign not only endorses Kar-Go’s autonomous delivery vehicle innovation, but is strong signal that the startup is onto a significantly sized opportunity. The startup has promised to “remove up to 90% of the cost associated with the last mile of delivery” through the use of robotics and driverless vehicle technology.
This also helps show the naysayers (and we had a lot in the comments of the last article) the real potential Kar-Go’s innovation has.
Here’s a video of Kar-Go’s launch event of the funding round:
7 comments
They’ve really done the impossible and congrats to Sachiti! From here on out the real challenge is selling the idea better than other companies in this business, especially the ones closer to Shenzhen. I haven’t seen the one Sachiti’s making but I’m sure it has a real advantage over the competition.
He has joined the race and his idea does indeed look solid. One problem that he is likely to face is security and I don’t just mean Trump’s infamous 181kg (400 pounds) man who seats on his bed and likes to cause havoc. I mean the traditional robber. He is being presented his with a lucrative target. Driving around unattended with expensive wares like iPhones in it’s juicy guts. I can see the Self Driving vehicle being relieved of its cargo. Not just him, Amazon too. Drones will be shot down and thieves escaping with the loot. It took the Morris worm to make people aware of the malevolent nature of the internet. I hope they think about this.
As much as I don’t want to sound green either, self-driving cars are not going mainstream yet.
They are a great innovation and good learning experience but business-wise they are far from viable. This is the main reason both Google and Tesla are not putting them at the fore-front.
Self driving cars won’t be crusing down the streets anytime soon – the AI lacks the human factor. How does an AI react to decisions human would make in driving, like with pedestrians or other cars.
And the legal issue is who gets blamed when a self driving car kills someone?
Another thing that scares me is this techpreneur is not in it to build a vision. He creates a company, makes a lot of noise, and sells it. In the end all that innovation ends up lying in the databases and warehouses of bigger companies once they take what they need.
I completely disagree. Tesla is putting this technology at the forefront, their model 3’s main feature is in fact autonomy and all Tesla vehicles from 2015 have full autonomy hardware built in. Google’s biggest spend is autonomous vehicles, they are currently running vehicles through their company called Waymo.
Autonomous vehicles drive up to 4 times better than humans currently, way beyond the human level. This means, yes, autonomous cars drive better than you, much like a calculator can out-do you in maths. If you disagree maybe a PHD in AI will help you see the light.
Here is a list of 44 corporations all working on autonomous cars.
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/autonomous-driverless-vehicles-corporations-list/
There are over 100 000 driverless cars on the roads today and they are legal in many states and in several countries in Europe. Autonomous cars are not coming, they are already here. BBC even covered them in a documentary here called dawn of the autonomous car http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wwnwk.
We are in an age of the rise of the robots, the reason why we have so many naysayers is that people just don’t understand the tech.
Very true
stupid zimbabweans always hating,shut up!
The autonomous cars have proved to be a great success so far, mainly in the West. The roads over there are clearly marked with lots of cameras all on an IP grid. In the 3rd World, Sachiti’s project will face serious challenges due to poverty (robberies/theft) and poor roads having huge potholes and even jay walking or pedestrians crossing the road willy nilly. if you check out the battery of the self-driving vehicle, it is mounted under the vehicle where chances of being damaged on poor roads are high. However, there is also technology to detect potholes and one can assume that this is factored into the AI algorithm. Proximity sensors are used to detect objects around the vehicle and G-force sensors detect motion and impact etc. Very exciting project!!