Nauto – Autonomous Driving Data from Real Drivers
Summary
On one hand, we’d like to believe that the vast efficiencies we’ll realize with artificial intelligence algorithms place us on the cusp of the biggest bull market mankind has ever seen. Here are the sorts of conflicting messages we’re talking about using the recent IPO of Blue Apron (NYSE:APRN) as an example: One company that should really be hoping for a bear market right now is Softbank (TYO:9984). As Warren Buffet said, “prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices”, and Softbank has about $100 billion reasons why they should be praying to their favorite Japanese God that we see a bear market ASAP. Not to be confused with Naruto, the third-best selling manga of all time, Nauto is the name of a Silicon Valley based autonomous vehicle technology startup that was founded in 2015 and has taken in nearly $174 million in funding so far. Throw in the added benefit of a 80% reduction in claims costs in the rare case of an accident, and it’s easy to see that it wasn’t just the manga-sounding name that made Masayoshi Son place a bet on this remarkably cool autotech company.
