The Venn diagram of engineers who know a little bit about AI, self-driving, and mining has a small intersection. Pronto.ai CEO Anthony Levandowski wants as many of those people as possible. And an acquisition is helping him achieve that goal.
The San Francisco-based startup, which has developed a self-driving system designed for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles used at construction and mining sites, has acquired competitor SafeAI, TechCrunch has learned.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. However, Levandowski said the acquisition is a talent and technology play. The bulk of the small 12-person startup’s engineering team and its IP will come over to Pronto. A source familiar with the deal said the SafeAI acquisition price was in “the millions.”
“In the autonomous haulage system space, there’s really kind of two players — it’s SafeAI and us,” Levandowski told TechCrunch in a recent interview, adding that SafeAI and Pronto have taken different approaches to the market. “We’ve been growing a ton and needed to add more people and resources to the team, so it made sense to purchase them … have more wood behind fewer arrows so that we could grow faster.”
Pronto, which was co-founded with Ognen Stojanovski in 2018, uses advanced sensors, cameras, and artificial intelligence to operate haul trucks autonomously. Pronto also uses Pollen Mobile, a peer-to-peer open source mobile data network the startup launched in 2022 that allows it to exchange data anonymously and at high speeds without relying on legacy carriers. Pollen is used to support sites with little to no connectivity.
Pronto has kept its team fairly lean at about 40 people. The SafeAI acquisition will help Pronto serve more customers, including internationally, Levandowski said. Last year, Pronto extended a partnership with Heidelberg Materials North America, one of the largest build materials and cement producers in the world, following a pilot program at the company’s Bridgeport Quarry in Texas. Pronto’s technology is integrated into Komatsu haulage trucks, which operates autonomously at the site.
Earlier this year, Pronto announced an agreement with Heidelberg to deploy more than 100 autonomous trucks and expand its team in Brazil.
The acquisition will also allow Pronto to meet a variety of needs from small quarries to large mines.
Notably, the acquisition will allow Pronto to offer customers a tiered technology portfolio. Pronto is known for its camera-only approach. SafeAI, which was founded in 2017 and raised $38 million in a Series B round of funding three years ago, uses multiple sensors, on-vehicle cameras, radar, and lidar. Pronto plans to offer the multi-sensor approach as well as use SafeAI’s safety framework that has been ASIL D-certified, the highest safety integrity level in the industry.
