JITO Angel Network (JAN), the only global community-based Angel network in India, today announced it joined a group of angel investors in investing $1.7 million in the seed fund round of one of India’s first self-driving vehicle start-ups, Minus Zero.

JITO Angel Network joined Chiratae Ventures, which led the investment round, and other investors including senior executives from NVIDIA & Lyft, based out of San Francisco Bay area. The group of investors are keen to fuel the next phase of development at Minus Zero.

Led by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero is building affordable, fully autonomous vehicle fleets that are capable of fully driverless manoeuvres in unstructured and disorganized traffic scenarios. Its technology is powered by proprietary nature-inspired AI that is less dependent on extensive data and costly sensor suite such as LiDAR, and mini super-computers on-vehicle.

“Although the driverless car market is in the early stages, the amount of activity that has happened in this space over the past few years makes it a promising space. There is huge untapped potential within India that Minus Zero can tap in the coming years,” said Sunil Kumar Singhvi – Vice Chairman, JAN. “Its focus on not just building a proprietary technology but ensuring that the end product is affordable to Indian user is what makes Minus Zero all the more interesting.”

According to Mordor Intelligence, the autonomous car market was valued at $22.22 billion in 2021. Through its forecast period of 2022-27, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.7% to reach $ 75.95 billion by 2027.

Gagandeep Reehal, CEO & CTO, Mins Zero said, “Our nature-inspired AI reinvents autonomy from the ground up, solving for the nuanced bottlenecks that have been a challenge for the entire ecosystem. With multiple patents in the pipeline, our proprietary approach towards self-driving mimics human intuition giving the software an ability to gain confident insights even with lesser data inputs. Safety is and will be our foremost priority”

“This vote of confidence marks the onset of this new-age mobility in the country where others would have preferably presumed that self-driving might be impossible considering the traffic here as we all know it. Having reinforced ourselves with a stellar team, seasoned advisors & development partners from the AV ecosystem, we are completely on track to achieving our next milestones. And with that said, we continue to look for people who share this bold vision of solving the most challenging AI problem in the books,” Gursimran Karla, co-founder said.

JAN has been in the forefront of boosting the funding ecosystem for early stage innovated start-ups in the country. In FY22, the network invested around INR 47 crores in fresh as well as follow-on investments in as many as 28 start-up companies. The investments supported companies with strong products and services in different early stages of funding.