Startup expands into commercial and B2B services

The Berlin-based startup has developed teleoperations technology that allows employees sitting in an office to pilot empty vehicles to customers

Vay, a startup that has put a teleoperated twist to car-sharing in Berlin and Las Vegas, is expanding into commercial and business-to-business (B2B) services buoyed by recent deals with French automaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy.

Vay isn’t a traditional ride-hailing or car-sharing startup, nor does it operate a robotaxi service. And yet, when customers open the Vay app and hail a car, it arrives without a human behind the wheel.

The Berlin-based startup, which was founded in 2019 and has raised around $110 million to date, has developed teleoperations technology that allows employees sitting in an office to pilot empty vehicles to customers. Once the Vay vehicle arrives, the customer sits in and takes over manual control of the car. Customers drive themselves to their destination. Once they are finished, the teleops driver pilots the vehicle back.

The new B2B division is a bet on what co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe thinks is the future of mobility, he told TechCrunch.

This is what we predict the future of vehicles will look like, he added. You just click a button, you get a van or truck or private vehicle to be teledrive-enabled.

Von der Ohe said that teledriving technology is so inexpensive from a capital expenditure perspective, he expects that within five to 10 years, any kind of vehicle that runs from the production line will be teleop-enabled, leveraging the ADAS cameras that are already on the vehicle.

It is here where Vay hopes to carve out deals and market share. The expansion, led by a task force within the firm’s business development team headed up by Chief Business Officer Justin Spratt, aims to be an AWS of sorts for vehicle fleets. That means Vay would supply the teledriving platform for automakers, car share and rental firms, trucking, luxury / telechauffeuring, and delivery and logistics.