Driving into the Future

It’s a sunny day in Mountain View, and I’m for once not stressing about Bay Area traffic as I sit in the passenger seat and am driven to my destination…by software.

It’s a brave new world, and Lightspeed is proud to be driving into the future and announcing today our investment in Apex.AI, an early stage company developing a commercial-grade software framework for autonomous mobility systems. As early investors in the company, having led their seed round over a year ago, today we double down on our investment as Apex.AI announces their Series A financing.

Whenever we back an innovative and emerging technology, we look for a team with deep expertise in the space. We found that in Jan and Dejan — the co-founders of Apex. Jan Becker has over 20 years of experience in the autonomous driving space, including leading the team at Bosch that developed autonomous vehicles, and serving as a lecturer at Stanford University where he teaches a course on autonomous vehicles. Jan is joined by his co-founder and CTO of Apex, Dejan Pangercic, who has held senior technical roles at Bosch and more. This duo has over 80 published articles and hold over 30 patents.

Apex.AI’s core product, Apex.OS, is a safe and secure, real-time production quality and regulatory-compliant operating system for the autonomous vehicle deployment stack. Apex.OS allows developers to abstract hardware, interfaces, and other middleware pieces, enabling developers to focus on the application layer of their use cases. The company’s software will interact with basic functionalities such as control of the vehicle, motion planning, behavior planning, mapping and localization, and perception and prediction.

Autonomous vehicles are destined to have an outsized impact in the coming future and we believe that providing a critical piece of the software stack that powers this market will not only be a large opportunity, but a mission-critical one as Apex.AI delivers a reliable, robust, secure, and safe product to the vehicles that will eventually transport the world.

Congrats to Jan and Dejan and the team, and onwards to the road ahead!