By Bryan Salesky, CEO, Argo AI and Reinhard Stolle, Vice President, Argo Munich
Today, with the close of Volkswagen AG’s investment, we become a global company and welcome new teammates to the Argo AI family. This news not only solidifies our well-capitalized position, but differentiates us as the only self-driving technology platform company with partnerships and commercial agreements for deployment across the U.S. and Europe.
As first announced last July, our partnership with Volkswagen also includes the contribution of VW Group’s Munich-based Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) team. The team in Munich brings an incredible wealth of talent, insight, and experience that we couldn’t be more excited about. We look forward to celebrating the establishment of Argo Munich, which will serve as our European headquarters.
Munich will become our fifth engineering center, building on Pittsburgh — our global headquarters — along with Detroit, Palo Alto, and Cranbury, N.J. We maintain fleet operations in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Austin.
Our mission is built on the importance of developing trust in self-driving technology. Now that we will be working across two continents with our partners Ford and Volkswagen, that mission is more important than ever. With support from two of the world’s largest automakers, our future is bright. Our self-driving system has the largest geographic deployment potential of any autonomous driving technology to date. It also has the potential to be integrated into many vehicle types across multiple brands. With Volkswagen and Ford integrating Argo AI’s self-driving system into their vehicles to support distinct initiatives for moving people and goods, we have a clear pathway to making a positive impact on the world.
From the start, we knew that strong partnerships would be the key to successfully realizing a new form of mobility that has the potential to scale worldwide. We are committed to working with our partners in a collaborative and transparent way at every step of the design, engineering, manufacturing, and ultimate deployment of self-driving vehicles. No well-executed product at this level of innovation has been created by just one person, one team, or one company.
The addition of Argo Munich expands our employee base to more than 1,000 people worldwide. While we’re just getting to know our new team members, we already have a bond due to the vision we share to apply technology to improve people’s lives. Together, our story will be told not through our technology, but by how we make the world a better place.
We’ve always had global ambitions. Today, we take a key step toward achieving our goals.