Minus Zero Pioneering Nature-inspired AI Tech To Address Mobility Challenges In India: CEO Reehal
Below is an excerpt from the conversation we had with him:
What is your approach to autonomous driving? How do you plan to enable it in India?
Driving in India is definitely a different challenge. So, we are building a lot of intellectual property (IP) around artificial intelligence (AI). It’s foundational work that we have developed to go inside vehicles to make them drive autonomously. In simple terms, we are creating intel inside vehicles like what Android is for smartphones. We are making a technology that is not just restricted to India but is open to the world. Minus Zero is already in talks with the six to eight major automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) globally including the ones from Germany, Japan and Korea.
Is India ready for autonomous driving?
I think it is not fair to say autonomous driving is not for India considering the level of unprecedented accidents and the heavy traffic in the country. Hence, the advanced technology is a must. On average, a traveller wastes nearly two to three hours stuck in traffic every day which is a common scenario in India’s busiest cities hindering productivity and otherwise causing frustration and mental health. This eventually hampers billions of dollars in profits. So, we are building a core tech that works on nature-inspired AI to solve the issue.
What is Nature-inspired AI?
Right now, though generative AI is booming it is still not scalable and needs a huge amount of computing power and a lot of data to even do that. It is more about just image. But when you talk about intelligence, that’s the ultimate goal of AI – understanding social behaviour, and what people will do next. For example, will the pedestrian cross the road or not? For this, we need the nature-inspired AI which is something we have been working on. We have a large language model (LLM) but we are building the next thing what we call a world model which is not just limited to text and images but understands the social cues and behaviour like how things behave and why they behave, and more. Nature-inspired AI is inspired by the human mind, designed to mimic how a human brain learns, adapts and is able to make decisions. That is the core IP we have built. We are the first company in India to demo autonomous e-rickshaw live on public road.
How much has Minus Zero raised so far?
We are currently in the seed stage and have managed to raise USD 1.7 million to date from top investors including Chiratae Ventures, Snow Leopard Ventures, JITO Angel Network and other top industry professionals. Our innovative venture still has a lot of runways left in the bank. We are currently looking at the global interest from OEMs, regulators and the relevant stakeholders. Now our goal is to ramp up this very quickly. So that we can kind of over-deliver vehicles that are automated vehicles.
What is the company’s future target?
Our aim is to create an advanced experience, wherein the driver will just relax while driving on the highway or in certain urban regions. The first-generation product will completely change the old patterns and the vehicle will only surrender to the user’s control in rural areas, or in the region off the highway. The industry has already spent around USD 100 billion in research and development (R&D) which is more than the funds raised by the entire Indian startup ecosystem. We are accordingly a smaller part of this promising segment.
Are you planning to expand your team?
The kind of bar we are aiming at, we are definitely looking to expand our talent. We are 25 in number right now and are planning to reach a team size of 150 over the next two years. Moreover, we hire very extensively on the core AI-research, engineering, hardware optimisation and almost all verticals of the technology as we are not an automotive company but a tech firm.
