Ike

History

2020: Nuro purchased Ike

At the end of December, 2020 the robotic company Nuro announced purchase of Ike, the startup based by former employees of Apple, Google and Uber. Ike is engaged in development and deployment of pilotless trucks. Financial terms of transaction are not disclosed.

The Nuro company is estimated at $5 billion, it has more than 600 employees. In Ike about 60 people work, in 2019 the startup was estimated at $250 million according to the CEO of Ike Alden Vudrou who became the cofounder of the company together with Yur van den Bergh and Nancey San, more than 55 employees of Ike and also three founders of a startup will pass into Nuro.

Alden Vudrou, N¾nsi San, Yur van den Bergh

I think, obviously, the Ike command and how qualitative technologies is how improbable they created, - the cofounder and the president of Nuro Dave Ferguson shared with TechCrunch. - What is especially attractive to Nuro, so is that few years ago Ike licensed a technology stack of Nuro, all technologies which they created are at top of this stack, there is general DNA. The technology which they developed also is something that we can transfer and connect to our system very easily.

According to Ferguson, Nuro can integrate the technology created by Ike into the proprietary application for local delivery and also use it for potential future applications. About what applications there is a speech - meanwhile it is unknown. Patent requests from Nuro demonstrate that the company has a set of the ideas - from delivery of hot pizza and latte before use of small robots. With the Ike command, it is possible that Nuro will go beyond local delivery, in particular in "average mile". Ferguson noticed at once that the bot supplier of Nuro company under name R2 is its first and main product.^[1]

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