Phantom Auto, a South San Francisco startup specializing in remotely operated vehicle software is shutting down after seven years of operation, according to a post on LinkedIn by its CEO.
"There are various factors contributing to this, including market conditions and insufficient funding," wrote Phantom CEO Shai Magzimof.
The startup founded in 2017 had once been a darling of investors, raising $95 million from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners and Maniv Mobility, and valued at $525 million just a year ago, according to Pitchbook. It had secured a number of promising partnerships with Maersk, CJ Logistics and ArcBest, and once conducted a feasibility study with the City of Sacramento to test the viability of remote and self driving cars in the area.
However funding fell through on its latest round unexpectedly at a time when the business was still mostly reliant on external funding, an anonymous source told TechCrunch.
Phantom wowed techies at its debut demo at the CES in Las Vegas in 2018. At the time the company was angling to use its software to allow remote workers to take over control of autonomous vehicles when they got confused and ran into snags.
"A remote operator sitting in Mountain View tele-operated a vehicle all around Las Vegas in the middle of a show that had a humongous amount of visitors in town, through foot traffic and vehicle traffic, at night and often in areas with no lane markings," Phantom co-founder Elliot Katz told the Silicon Valley Business Journal at the time. "We were able to operate when most other autonomous vehicle demonstrations had to come to a halt because it started to rain."
The company later pivoted to the logistics industry with remotely operated fork lifts and inking funding deals and test pilot programs with major logistics players.
Phantom employed about 100 people at the time of its shut down.
