Much has been written about the failures of autonomous driving cars in places like San Francisco. But the real success and perhaps even bigger opportunity is in industrial vehicles in ports, factories and airports.
In fact, the global heavy-duty autonomous vehicle market was valued at $135.25 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to reach $1.45 trillion by 2032, according to Research and Markets.
Venti Technologies, based in both Singapore and Boston, Massachusetts, is helping to advance the category with its autonomous logistics for industrial and global supply chain hubs. The company was founded in 2018 by CEO Dr. Heidi Wyle along with Dr. Daniela Rus, MIT Professor and Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Dr. Saman Amarasinghe, MIT Professor; and Dr. Xinxin Du, Venti CSO and former MIT graduate student. This founder’s journey is based on my interview with Heidi Wyle.
“We use computation, call it AI, to improve the global supply chain. It’s that simple. We move goods, not people. And we’re the world leader in autonomous logistics for global supply chain and industrial hubs,” says Wyle.
The technology and algorithms behind Venti were invented by Dr. Daniela Rus, who is also the director of CSAIL—the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which in the past has been the source of many start-ups representing some $2 trillion in revenue.
“I had founded a company and had recently sold it, so Daniela had been after me to start a company with her. I knew that if Daniela had this technology, it would be best in the world because that’s who she is. And we share that vision of 360-degree excellence and hard work,” says Wyle.
Wyle and her co-founders made the decision to start in Asia because the market was ahead of the US in autonomous vehicles. Wyle had also worked some in China with previous work engagements. The original vision for the company’s direction was to expand Rue’s autonomous wheelchair invention into that market.
The company’s direction and fortunes changed when they found a partner with the Singaporean port. “We’ve been working with them now for about three years. They are very tough. They are excruciatingly detail oriented. But we share a belief in technology excellence and integrity. And so, we have bonded as a team with them. And they want to be best in the world at this tech. And they’re making us so as well,” says Wyle.
Preparing a container port of this size for the use of autonomous vehicles is no small technological feat. The container port is six kilometres on a side and Venti had to GPS map the facility down to a meter. Then, using mathematical modelling, deep learning, and theoretically grounded algorithms, Venti’s proprietary platform of autonomy technologies, including a suite of powerful logistics algorithms is deployed to automate the interactions between vehicles at one of largest and most technologically sophisticated ports in the world.
Working with the world’s leading port operator provides Venti the opportunity to bring the economics of autonomous vehicles to over 60 ports globally. These ports operate 24/7 requiring 2-3 shifts of human drivers. With Venti’s technology, Ports can reduce labor costs by 60% while increasing efficiency and maintaining safety. Plus, autonomous vehicles don’t get Covid, which was the source of the slow-down in the world’s supply chain during the Pandemic.
While the company works to expand its relationship in Singapore, by Wyle’s calculations, Venti’s total addressable market incorporates the potential to automate some 1,000,000 factories representing 50,000,000 vehicles, 825 ports representing another 208,000 vehicles and 17,700 airports with another 1,300,000 vehicles.
As a result, the company has raised nearly $40 million in venture capital to date. Its most recent $28.8 million A Round was led by LG Technology Venture in March of 2023. Additional investors include Alpha JWC Ventures, LDV Partners, UOB Venture, Safar Partners and others.
Wyle grew up in Philadelphia the daughter of an immigrant German father and housewife mother. “I grew up really poor. My parents weren’t really very competent in the world,” says Wyle. As a result, school was very important to her where she excelled in math and physics.
Her world opened up for her when she secured a scholarship to Brown University where she graduated with honors in physics, followed by MIT graduate school where she earned her master’s in health and medical physics and went on to earn her PhD in philosophy, followed by her MBA from Harvard. Following her academic life, she held positions of leadership in several companies before starting her first business CellStore/Ardais to develop human clinical tissue libraries for genomics-based drug development. That was followed by the founding of her next company, Computational Biology Corporation, which had a successful exist when the company was acquired by Agilent, prior to the founding of Venti Technologies.
Though Wyle has had great success in business, she is eager to point out that she has a higher purpose in mind with the founding and development of Venti. “I’m doing this because I want to make the world cleaner and safer for people and also for animals. We’re going to work with our port partners to help save whales by having their huge ships go a mile out of their way to miss the male whale migration,” says Wyle.
As for the future? “With fully autonomous facilities, the cost of transportation will come down. And that’s a good thing for all of us. Over the next 5 or so years, we will be operating in the US and hopefully be the leader. We will for sure be in Japan, Asia and Europe to become truly global. At that point we’ll probably have gone public though that’s not my goal. My goal is to build a great company. And we will have pioneered, in my opinion, improving people’s lives by getting them their goods more cheaply,” concludes Wyle.
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