Take a stroll around San Francisco and it won’t take long to spot an empty autonomous vehicle cruising the city’s streets, waiting to be hailed by a rider or heading off to a distant depot to be charged and cleaned. These deadhead miles — an industry term for miles driven without a paying passenger — are one of the biggest barriers between robotaxi companies and profitability.

A Redwood City, California-based startup Aseon Labs thinks it has a fix: parking space-sized automated pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis. The company, co-founded by the team behind battery-swapping startup Pushme, calls them robotic pit stops for robotaxi industry. And the idea has caught the attention of investors.

Aseon Labs has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners, TechCrunch has learned. Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital also participated along with angel investors such as serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Adrian Aoun, Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund, Zimride co-founder Rajat Suri, and operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.

Aseon Labs is still in the early stages. The seed funds will be used to build five prototypes of these pods, grow its six-person robotics and engineering team to about a dozen, and secure the real estate needed to build out its network, according to Aseon Labs co-founder and CEO George Kalligeros.

“In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up,” Kalligeros told TechCrunch. “You need the robotaxi in continuous operation during the entirety of the demand curve of the day.”

Aseon’s pitch is that a network of distributed autonomous pods would slash deadhead miles, and inevitably turn robotaxi services into profitable enterprises.

Kalligeros and co-founder and COO Dan Keene come from outside the autonomous vehicle world. But they bring experience developing and scaling a hardware-and-real estate company. Kalligeros worked as a mechanical design engineer at Bentley Motors and Tesla before he and Keene founded Pushme in 2016 to build battery-swapping infrastructure for micromobility fleets. Pushme was building a battery swap network in Europe when it was acquired in January 2020 by Tier Mobility.

“The parallel I’ll draw is we were basically tasked by SoftBank to put this across as many markets where it made sense for Tier within a very short and compressed period of time,” Kalligeros said. “The playbook became, how do we sprinkle the locations across the center of the city, where it makes sense, but at the same time, make it easy to deploy as non-permanent infrastructure?”

Aseon Labs is applying the same thinking to autonomous vehicles.

As they researched the industry, the pair visited AV depots, where fleets of robotaxis are inspected, maintained, cleaned, and charged. The cost of real estate often prompts companies to locate these depots outside the city center, where most of the ride-hailing activity occurs.

“Depot infrastructure is the key requirement for the launch of a new city for any AV operator,” he said. “And what happens in the depot right now — the operational backbone of autonomy, really — is not fully baked.”

The founders settled on the idea of creating smaller, independently powered autonomous pods that could be dispersed throughout a city but as importantly, they could also be moved as needed. The units, which include cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interiors, are considered temporary structures. That classification helps Aseon Labs avoid lengthy permitting process and allows the company to relocate units if a location underperforms.

The units are designed to run on a propane generator for power or connect to an existing power source through partnerships with EV charging companies. They are meant to operate autonomously, although early versions will be staffed, according to Kalligeros.

Aseon Labs isn’t trying to tackle every edge case, either. Instead, it leans on computer vision and AI — specifically vision-language-action models common in modern robotics — to detect problems the pod shouldn’t try to solve. For example, if a camera detects melted chocolate on a backseat, the robotic arm stands down since attempting to clean it could make the stain worse. Instead, the vehicle will be charged and dispatched directly to that company’s central depot for a human to handle.

Aseon Labs hasn’t signed contracts with any robotaxi companies yet, but Kalligeros said there is widespread interest in the concept. “Pretty much everyone wants to try it,” he said.

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