One of India’s first self-driving car startups, Minus Zero, has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Chiratae Ventures, JITO Angel Network, and executives from NVIDIA and Lyft in Silicon Valley, among others.

The funding will primarily be used to build an extensive autonomous vehicle R&D infrastructure and expand the team to get the cars on the road. The team is eyeing a public release of their first self-driving car use case from late 2022 to early 2023.

Founded in 2021 by Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra as students, the Bengaluru-based startup combines camera-based vision and algorithms.

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“Autonomous vehicles are no longer a thing of the future; they need to be a reality now,” said TCM Sundaram, founder and vice-chairman of Chiratae Ventures.