We were founded on the premise of enabling a safer, more human-centered implementation of autonomous technology, and called ourselves Humanising Autonomy because that was what we wanted to do.

We started the company because we realised that our position on urban mobility was not being reflected by the automotive industry’s view of automated vehicles in the cities of today and tomorrow. We want to see cities where mobility systems — private vehicles, ridesharing fleets, public transportation — take into account the vulnerable road users outside the vehicle, not just focus on the interior experience. The pedestrians, cyclists, and other users of the road should be able to interact with these vehicles — and the vehicles will need to understand this nuanced communication to be able to safely and efficiently navigate complex urban environments.

We discovered an opportunity to create something truly necessary, but in our view underserved by current technology, and started developing our own AI-powered technology that can predict the full range of pedestrian and vulnerable road user behaviour in real time for the safer, and more trustworthy mobility systems that we have in our minds.

While the initial idea was centred around pedestrian interaction with fully autonomous cars, we realised that the technology we were building didn’t have to wait for that future; we realised we could help make cities today safer, through better driver assistance systems in human driven cars as well as automated transit systems that currently operate in the world. At the same time, we can deploy our technology in the highly automated vehicles of tomorrow, to make sure that pedestrians and other vulnerable users are properly taken into account; we are very proud of being featured in the UK Department for Transport’s Future Mobility Strategy around autonomous vehicles, and excited to be working with forward-thinking automotive partners for this purpose.

However, the team that we built in the last couple of years is what we are most proud of, and excited by. We have somehow amalgamated a group of extremely talented, motivated, and fun people, tackling this mobility challenge together. As a company, our goal is to set the global standard for human-machine interactions — how autonomous technology can better understand the needs of people; as such, one of the main priorities of our recently-closed funding round is to complement and grow this group of people with the right new talent, both in our (half-female) technical team and commercial team. We are extremely excited for this next step in our company — check out our careers page, and please reach out if you think you can help us realise our vision of better interactions between people and autonomous technology worldwide.

This piece was written by Raunaq Bose, CTO and Co-Founder of Humanising Autonomy. We develop natural interactions between people and autonomous vehicles. 👋🤖🚗