Source: Time

By Katy Steinmetz / San Francisco

When others looked at Uber’saggressive expansion around the world and wondered if the super-unicorn wasn’t going too fast or taking too little care, one imagines the founders of Otto looked on with much approval.

Before January, this startup specializing in outfitting commercial trucks with self-driving technology did not exist. Its expert employees were toiling away on autonomous vehicle projects at places like Google, Apple and Tesla. They left to start this venture, says cofounder and former Google Maps head Lior Ron, because they wanted to bring something to market “sooner rather than later.” And now, in a deal worth an estimated $680 million, the San Francisco-based Otto has become an independent division within Uber, another company “with that level of intensity and urgency and focus to start putting cars on a road, and not as an R&D exercise,” as Ron puts it, referring to research and development.

There were other draws, too. Uber has formed its own expert team of robotics experts, many from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, to help launch self-driving cars that will ferry its users from A to B. With this deal, Uber may have acqui-hired Otto’s seasoned staff, but that staff is also clearly excited about having access to those minds in Pittsburgh. There’s also Uber’s wealth of data, which Ron describes as nothing short of historic. (“Just imagine tapping into the collective Uber brain of all the cars going on every road in every state in every kind of weather in every time of day,” he says.) And there is Uber’s know-how when it comes to building marketplaces, which is a key part of Otto’s vision.

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