The autonomous vehicle industry is heating up thanks to advances in AI. But can those same innovations help startups like HyprLabs build safe tech? For the last year and a half, two hacked white Tesla Model 3 sedans each loaded with five extra cameras and one palm-sized supercomputer have quietly cruised around San Francisco . In a city and era swarming with questions about the capabilities and limits of artificial intelligence, the startup behind the modified Teslas is trying to answer what amounts to a simple question: How quickly can a company build autonomous vehicle software today? The startup, which is making its activities public for the first time today, is called HyprLabs .

She begins at Zoox on Feb. 26. Her hiring makes Ms. Evans, born in Senegal and raised in Paris, one of the most high-profile black women running a Silicon Valley tech company. She succeeds Tim Kentley-Klay, the co-founder who was removed as CEO by Zoox's board last August after the company had completed a $500 million round that valued the company at $3.2 billion. At the time of his ouster, Mr. Kentley-Klay said in a statement that the board abruptly fired him and "chose a path of fear, optimizing for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the universe." Mr. Kentley-Klay, an Australian designer, co-founded the company in 2014 with Jesse Levinson, who had made a name for himself in self-driving car development at Stanford University.

Zoox co-founder and CEO Tim Kentley-Klay, left and co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson intend to launch a branded robotaxi service using purpose-built electric vehicles by 2020. Zoox knows it needs hefty investment to turn a vision of an on-demand ride service using purpose-built robotic vehicles designed without conventional driving controls into reality. Fortunately, the stealthy startup made more progress on the financial front, snagging $500 million in a Series B funding round led by Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes who is also joining the Zoox board. Led by Australian artist and entrepreneur Tim Kentley-Klay and computer scientist Jesse Levinson, the Foster City, California-based company has now raised nearly $800 million with a goal of launching its branded service in 2020. The new funds, reported earlier by Bloomberg Businessweek, lift Zoox's valuation to about $3.2 billion, Kentley-Klay told Forbes.

Zoox co-founders Tim Kentley-Klay, center, and Jesse Levinson, center left, with staff at the company's new headquarters in Foster City, California, in April. At least 16% of the robotaxi startup's staff came from Tesla. Elon Musk's larger-than-life image and pursuit of clean auto and energy tech help Tesla attract talented engineers who are drawn to its mission. Inevitably, a lot of those bright people also discover that many companies put a premium on skills they've honed at Tesla, none more so than the stealthy robotaxi startup Zoox. The Silicon Valley-based company, led by Australian artist and designer Tim Kentley-Klay, plans to deploy fully robotic, electric ride-service vehicles, with no steering wheels or brake and accelerator pedals, that it's designing from the ground up.

A secretive, billion-dollar start-up founded by an Australian designer, is taking its first steps out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Zoox, the autonomous mobility firm building a driverless vehicle (but not a car) from scratch, which is officially in "stealth mode", is making noise in Silicon Valley and beyond. Ford and Domino's Pizza in the US will be trialling self-driving vehicle deliveries to selected customers in Michigan. Will there be a day when solar plus batteries will start wiping fossil fuels off the grid? The economics of getting to space are about to undergo a massive change.

What it does: Despite remaining in stealth, Zoox has already raised $290 million for its unseen product. The only hint founder Tim Kentley-Klay has given was at a conference in October, when he described it as "Disneyland on the streets": "At Zoox what we're creating ... is not a self-driving car any more than the automobile is a horseless carriage. We're not building a robo-taxi service -- we're actually creating an advanced mobility service," Kentley-Klay said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "You can really think of it as Disneyland on the streets of perhaps San Francisco, and that means a vehicle which is smart enough to understand its environment but it's also importantly smart enough to understand you, where you need to be, what you want to do in the vehicle, and how you want to move around the city."

Zoox Inc., the secretive Silicon Valley startup working to build its own self-driving cars, has quietly raised another round of funding that puts its valuation at $1.55 billion, a big jump from just a few months prior and a sign of increased interest in automotive technology. The Menlo Park, Calif., company founded by Tim Kentley-Klay, an Australian entrepreneur and designer, and Jesse Levinson, from Stanford University's self-driving car program, raised $50 million in October, according to people familiar with the matter. The new round of funding included an investment from Composite Capital, one of the people said. The Hong Kong-based hedge fund was launched over the summer by David Ma, previously a partner at Chinese fund manager Hillhouse Capital Group. Founded in 2014, Zoox had already raised $240 million, including $200 million this past summer at a valuation of $1 billion, said the people familiar with the matter.