Self-driving has made a big move in the last couple of years abroad — in the US, autonomous Waymos are completing thousands of trips per day in major US cities, and Chinese tech companies have been deploying autonomous vehicles too. But an Indian company seems to be trying to bring self-driving to to the busy roads of India.
Minus Zero, an AI startup headquartered in Bengaluru, today unveiled its end-to-end autopilot system. The system is engineered to navigate the notoriously complex and unstructured urban traffic conditions prevalent in Indian cities. In a demo video, the startup showed off its self-driven car driving the streets of Bengaluru navigating bike riders, street vendors and the odd cow.
“While ~90% of the ADAS products are deployed in few developed countries, >85% of road accidents of the world come from emerging countries, with much more need for such advanced driving assistance systems,” the company stated in its release. “At Minus Zero, we understand this unique pain point and technology shift required for building advanced autopilot systems for all the major emerging countries (starting with India).”
At the heart of Minus Zero’s technology is its proprietary “nature-inspired” AI platform, which mimics human decision-making processes to achieve true Level 5 autonomy—fully driverless vehicles without steering wheels or pedals. Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems that rely on costly sensor suites like LiDAR, radar, and high-definition (HD) maps, Minus Zero’s vision-based system uses a minimalistic array of six cameras to perceive the environment. This approach drastically reduces hardware costs, making autonomy accessible for a broader range of vehicles, from electric to internal combustion engine models.
Minus Zero was founded in 2020 by Gagandeep Rehal and Gulsimran Kalra. Rehal had graduated from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2019 with a degree in Computer Science, while Kalra had graduated from SRCC in 2021 with a B.Com degree. Two years ago, the company had demonstrated the zPod, a four-seater electric vehicle with inward-facing seats and no conventional controls, which was India’s first fully autonomous vehicle prototype. zPod was not intended for mass production, but served as a proof of concept for automakers to integrate Minus Zero’s AI platform into next-generation vehicles.
It might be years before self-driving is a reality on Indian roads, but Minus Zero has found some backers — the startup has raised $1.77M in funding from investors including IIT Mandi and Chiratae Ventures. Minus Zero aims to be a technology provider, offering its scalable AI platform to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and retrofitting existing vehicles with engine control modules to enable full autonomy.
And it’s perhaps for the best that India is coming up with its own self-driving startups. US and Chinese self-driving startups are likely not currently building for the challenges of self-driving on Indian roads including having no marked lanes, widespread traffic violations, and miscellaneous potholes and cattle. Self-driving is an area which needs an India-specific solution, and homegrown companies would do well to build it before India falls too far behind the rest of the world in autonomous driving.