REDWOOD CITY — Aseon Labs, based in Redwood City, California, raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Crane Venture Partners to develop automated cleaning and charging pods for robotaxis. The round included participation from Y Combinator, Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, Founders Capital, and angel investors Adrian Aoun, Immad Akhund, and Rajat Suri. Operators and founding team members from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut also contributed.

The company plans to use the capital to build five prototypes of its automated pods, grow its team from six to about twelve employees, and secure real estate for its network. George Kalligeros, co-founder and CEO of Aseon Labs, said increased utilization is necessary for robotaxis to achieve economic parity with ride-hailing services. "In order to reach economic parity with ride-hailing — which is where we need to get with self-driving cars — and to stop really subsidizing the cost, you need the utilization to go up," Kalligeros said. "You need the robotaxi in continuous operation during the entirety of the demand curve of the day."

Dan Keene is the co-founder and COO of Aseon Labs. Kalligeros previously worked as a mechanical design engineer at Bentley Motors and Tesla. He and Keene founded Pushme in 2016; Tier Mobility acquired the company in January 2020. "The parallel I'll draw is we were basically tasked by SoftBank to put this across as many markets where it made sense for Tier within a very short and compressed period of time," Kalligeros said regarding their previous venture.

Aseon Labs' automated pods use cameras to inspect vehicles and robotic arms to retrieve lost items and clean interiors. Classified as temporary structures, the pods can operate using a propane generator or other mobile power sources, or connect to existing power sources through partnerships with EV charging companies. Early versions of the pods will be staffed. The company uses vision-language-action models to identify problems the pods should not attempt to resolve. Aseon Labs has not yet signed contracts with any robotaxi companies.