Hyundai turns attention to teleoperations, invests in startup Ottopia

Amit Rosenzweig has turned his attention to autonomous vehicles after spending much of his career in mission-critical environments.

Having recognized that the technology would need what every other mission-critical system requires: humans, The ex-leader of product development at Microsoft said in a recent interview, “I understood that there are so many edge cases that will not be solved purely by AI and machine learning, and there must be some kind of human-in-the-loop intervention. You don’t have any mission-critical system on the planet — not nuclear power plants, not aeroplanes — without human supervision. A human must be in the loop or present in some way for autonomous mobility to existing, even in 10 or probably 20 years from now.”

His career had spawned mission-critical environments, including the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Intelligence and now his attention is turned to the “human in the loop”, leading him to found teleoperations startup Ottopia in 2018.

Ottopia’s first product is a universal teleoperation platform that allows a human operator to monitor and control any type of vehicle from thousands of miles away. The company’s software combined with off-the-shelf hardware components like monitors and cameras will create a teleoperations centre. The software also includes assistive features, which provide “path” instructions to the AV without having to remotely control the vehicle.

Since its launch, the 25-person company has racked up investors and partners such as BMW, fixed-route AV startup May Mobility and Bestmile.

In an interview on Friday, Ottopia said that it has raised $9 million from Hyundai Motor Group as well as Maven and IN Venture, the Israel-focused venture capital arm of Sumitomo Corporation. Existing investors MizMaa and Israeli firm NextGear also participated.

Hyundai and IN Venture gained board seats in the process.