On October 26, 2022, Doon Insights held the Auto / Mobility Tech Workshop on a coastal range resort. Surrounded by redwoods, exotic fruit trees, and a lovely pond, 50+ people arrived (a lot of Teslas!) to listen to 12 startups present solutions for near future transportation. Thought leaders led panel discussions on battery tech, directions in aviation, mobility, navigation, hydrogen, and supply chains.

About Doon

Doon Capital was founded in 2013 by Howard Chao and has made investments in about 50 startups. Doon Insights was founded in 2020 by Howard Chao and Nick Sramek with a purpose to make “good things happen” by bringing together handpicked startups with investors and thought leaders.

Startups

aifleet: aifleet is a technology company disrupting the $800B antiquated trucking industry. We are creating the first truly scalable trucking company by reversing the industry trend of underutilized assets and high driver turnover.

By leveraging advanced algorithms, we are infusing efficiency into the supply chain, and by treating our drivers with respect — starting with equitable pay — we are humanizing a historically transactional industry.

Analog Photonics: Analog Photonics is developing disruptive all solid-state LiDAR and optical communications products built on their proprietary 300 mm silicon photonics platform to enable a future where people and devices are highly connected, and autonomy is ubiquitous. Founded by Dr. Michael R. Watts, a long-standing leader in silicon photonics, Analog Photonics is a Boston-based technology company with expertise in advanced, large-scale and high-performance photonic and electronic application-specific integrated circuits. Think solid-state, chip-scale LiDAR for autonomous vehicle and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems based on their unique Optical Phased Array (OPA) technology. OPAs allow for rapid (sub-microsecond) electronic beam-steering and AP has become the world-leader in OPA technology. The AP OPA LiDAR is truly solid-state, requires no lenses or moving parts, exhibits a flat chip-scale form factor, can achieve a wide field of view, is immune to sunlight and interference, and provides 3D Doppler velocity maps in addition to range-based point clouds.

Ascendance is developing the technologies and services enabling a greener aviation. Our first product – Atea – is a Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft that will provide an alternative to helicopters with carbon emissions reduced by 80% and noise footprint divided by 4. This first product acts as a technology catalyst to develop Sterna - our in-house hybrid-electric propulsive technologies - that will then be leveraged on conventional aircrafts to meet the environmental goals set up for aviation.

First 1:1 prototype flight in 2023; First contract on Sterna 2023 with an aircraft manufacturer; Demonstration flight in 2024 for the Paris Olympics; 2025 certification.

Coastr is a full stack, hyper-connected “shared” mobility platform that utilises connected mobility solutions (IoT) and artificial intelligence to digitise end-to-end vehicle rental and fleet operations for operating multi-mobility offerings from one platform.

Coastr is digitising the shared mobility ecosystem (includes car rentals, car-sharing and subscription) with their full stack technology solution and unique tech-enabled partnerships with key players in the market to consolidate fragmented functionalities provided by siloed competitors, while introducing unique market leading AI and connected mobility solutions using direct integration with OEMs and IoT partners. Coastr’s mission is to decarbonise rental and fleet operations and make fleet operators future ready to cater to new consumer and market trends.

Compound Eye: True 3D perception for autonomous robots using conventional cameras instead of lidar or radar. Compound Eye is a leading developer of 3D sensing and perception systems for autonomous robots. The company's VIDAS technology delivers dense depth and per-pixel semantic class using only cameras. VIDAS is a fully redundant alternative to lidar and radar in applications from remote 3D sensing to collision avoidance to fully autonomous driving. The company is based in Redwood City, California and is backed by tier 1 investors including Khosla Ventures and K9 Ventures.

Compound Eye combines parallax and semantic cues in a single framework.

DriveU.auto: The DriveU.auto connectivity platform enables safe teleoperation of robots, autonomous vehicles, and more, using cellular bonding and dynamic encoding. The platform is already deployed and in use on public roads. It provides high speed, low latency, ultra-reliable transmission of video, audio streams, high-speed data, and control channels, and is available with hardware or as a software-only implementation.

The platform’s SDK and APIs enable quick and straightforward integration.

DriveU.auto is based on technology developed by LiveU, the world leader in cellular-based field video transmission, deployed by more than 3,000 customers worldwide.

Goggo: A last-mile delivery solution that connects businesses to autonomous robots for a unique delivery. Fleet Operator of autonomous and electric vehicles for last mile logistics, with a proprietary fleet management platform designed for multiple types of autonomous vehicles.

Goggo is building the largest vehicle-agnostic operator of autonomous and electric fleets. Goggo Network’s proprietary Logistic Platform is integrated with varied self-driving vehicles, ranging from logistic vehicles moving autonomously on the road, to robots that deliver goods moving on the sidewalks. Goggo Network’s product provides a seamless API integration with any e-commerce platform, restaurant, or grocery chain that needs to deliver products to stores or to end consumers.

Meili: Proactively stopping crashes and saving lives with deep learning medical emergency detection in vehicles.

Meili’s mission is two-fold: proactively stopping crashes to save lives and enabling mobility for all. Our deep learning medical emergency detection utilizes existing in-vehicle sensors to understand from a driver’s behavior and vitals when they are experiencing anything from a heart attack to a seizure to a diabetic emergency. Once this is detected, Meili again uses existing systems to alert the vehicle to come to a stop to avoid a crash, unlock doors for first responders, turn on hazard lights to reduce the risk of a post-stop crash, and alert EMS to ensure the driver receives life saving care.

Skyroads: Developing, testing, rolling out and operating the digital infrastructure required to scale Advanced and Urban Air Mobility while serving existing drone markets on the way.

Ensuring a roadmap into competitive unit economics for an entire industry by providing a common operating system that allows for unprecedented airspace density and supports the gradual removal of the human from the vehicle control loop.

Our design tenets assure fast development, certifiability, cost effectivity and interoperability for all participants. We promote and safeguard public desirability by empowering communities wishing to adopt AAM to remain in control of their skies.

Undertow: One of the gating challenges in producing advanced driver assistance systems, and ultimately true autonomy, is the lack of a reliable, performant, cost-effective depth sensor that allows the vehicle to understand its environment. Contemporary radar measurement capability is limited to shorter distances (50m), which forces auto OEMs to use an expensive and bulky LiDAR sensor for both the medium distance (150m) and long-distance (250m) sensing needed to enable true autonomy.

The Undertow sensor suite is based on a highly differentiated digital OFDM radar to meet this need. Our radar runs on a custom Undertow processor and provides >200x higher resolution & >4x higher refresh rates than the class-leading radars and >50x better resolution & >4x higher refresh rates than the class-leading LiDARs in the market today. This allows auto OEMs to consolidate all depth-sensing functions into a single device that integrates easily with their existing systems infrastructure – significantly reducing complexity and cutting cost by as much as an order of magnitude.

WattEV: Electrifying the transport industry through our electric Truck as a Service platform and robust charging network The Company's mission is to speed up the transition of US trucking transport into zero emission faster than anyone could expect. We use a combination of business and technology innovation to create infrastructure and data driven workflow that provides truckers and fleet operators the lowest total cost of ownership. Through our electric Truck as a Service (TaaS) offering, we remove the barriers to entry for transporters and owner operators and give access to an electric truck without any on the unknowns. Shippers can also meet their sustainability goals and meet state mandates sooner without any upfront costs by contracting their loads on our platform to be moved with electric trucks. Imagine 80% recharge in 25 minutes. The first charging station is under construction in Bakersfield CA.

Xona Space Systems: The first commercial “Super-GPS” built to support the autonomous world. Xona Space Systems is building PULSAR, a constellation of small but powerful “Super-GPS” satellites designed to enable safer operation of modern devices by providing ultra-reliable high-precision navigation services. PULSAR combines navigation technology from the worlds of military security, high-precision machine control, and civil aviation safety with high-power new-space technology to provide a service with sub- 10cm level accuracy that is over 100x more resistant to interference than existing GPS. Delivered via secure and powerful signals from Xona's low Earth orbit satellites, the patent-pending PULSAR service aims to enable the next wave of connected technology.