yaak
AI & VR platform to teach and learn how to drive
Latest round: €7.3M
Invested in: 2022
Investors: Maki.vc, First Fellow Partners
Founders: Søren Halskov Nissen, Harsimrat Sandhawalia, Martin Zielinski
Building a AI & VR platform to teach and learn how to drive
Driver coaching is a market that has seen very little innovation over the years. While ineffective driver training is costing €25B annually, a growing instructor shortage has driving schools buckling under increasing demands and narrowing profit margins. Yaak Technologies presents SafetyOS—the ultimate driving coaching platform that ties together 360 degree vision-based driver coaching, in-vehicle VR simulation training and consolidated safety scoring. Simulation lessons are cheaper and enable students to train good driving habits effectively, while allowing instructors to simply handle more students.
“We’re working on a solution that can certify the safe driving of autonomous vehicles and human drivers. At the same time, our experience in gaming helps us to make driving lessons motivating and exciting.”
Martin Zielinski
CTO & Co-founder of Yaak Technologies
The journey to building safe autonomous vehicles
Yaak Technologies’s expert team fluent in building cars, maps, autonomous systems, robots, simulation and cloud services realized one thing – autonomous vehicles (AV) would need to be significantly safer than human drivers to hit our roads. So putting safety before autonomy, they built a technology that can quantify and improve the safety of human drivers which will also provide the metrics to develop their autonomous stack. The result is SafetyOS that ushers in the new age of driving coaching using state of the art AI & VR.
“It’s great to see a seasoned founding team with essential experience building cars, maps, autonomous systems, robots, simulation, and cloud services enable the next generation of mobility through codifying the knowledge of driving instructors.”
PAULIINA MARTIKAINEN
Managing Partner at Maki.vc
Founders
Søren Halskov Nissen – CEO; Harsimrat Sandhawalia – Chief Scientist; Martin Zielinski – CTO
Previously the team has worked on autonomous vehicles and related core technologies at Carnegie Mellon, Apple, Unity, EPIC Games, Qamcom and Daimler Autonomous.
