Twelve years later, even some of his former Carnegie Mellon University teammates have become business competitors of Salesky, who with CMU alumnus and faculty adviser Peter Rander founded Argo AI and went on to attract substantial investments from Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE). At the 2007 self-driving competition staged by DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in remote Victorville, California, Salesky's CMU team and one from rival Stanford University included the future founders of at least four self-driving startups. Those competitors were Chris Urmson and Drew Bagnell of self-driving vehicle startup Aurora, Dave Ferguson of Nuro, Apex.ai's Jan Becker and Anthony Levandowski of Pronto.ai. Sebastian Thrun, who with Levandowski and Urmson helped build Google's self-driving business, also participated in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, as did Dmitri Dolgov, who now heads engineering at Google's self-driving spinout Waymo.

In the world of autonomous vehicles, Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley are bustling hubs of development and testing. But ask those involved in self-driving vehicles when we might actually see them carrying passengers in every city, and you'll get an almost universal answer: Not anytime soon. An optimistic assessment is 10 years. Many others say decades as researchers try to conquer a number of obstacles. The vehicles themselves will debut in limited, well-mapped areas within cities and spread outward.

The company, Argo AI, has since grown to about 330 employees, in part by luring away software engineers and robotics researchers from Apple Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and other tech companies. Ford, which holds a majority stake in the company, is banking on Argo to help it catch up in the race to build driverless cars. "Every employee is an owner," said Argo Chief Executive Bryan Salesky. "They're able to benefit from the upside being created in a direct way. That can't be offered with a large company where the stock goes up and down with earnings."

Two new announcements from Ford highlight how the auto and mobility company is harnessing technology to get ahead. With ambitious plans to launch an autonomous vehicle in 2021, Ford has announced that it is investing $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company founded by former Google and Uber leaders, to develop a virtual driver system. Argo AI founders Bryan Salesky, company CEO, and Peter Rander, COO, -- both of whom have worked on self-driving car teams at Google and Uber -- have brought together a team of some of the most experienced roboticists and engineers in the industry to develop the new system for Ford's SAE level 4 self-driving vehicles. "The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford's moving assembly line did 100 years ago," said Ford President and CEO Mark Fields. "As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford's leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future."

Ford Motor is spending $1 billion to take over a budding robotics startup to acquire more expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021. The big bet announced Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University's robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander. The alliance between Argo and Ford is the latest to combine the spunk and dexterity of a technologically savvy startup with the financial muscle and manufacturing knowhow of a major automaker in the race to develop autonomous vehicles. Last year rival General Motors paid $581 million (roughly Rs. 3,890 crores) to buy Cruise Automation, a 40-person software company that is testing vehicles in San Francisco. The Argo deal marks the next step in Ford's journey toward building a vehicle without a steering wheel or brake pedal by 2021 - a vision that CEO Mark Fields laid out last summer.

Ford announced plans today to invest $1 billion over the course of five years into a new, previously unheard of artificial intelligence startup called Argo AI. The company, which has operated in secret out of its Pittsburgh headquarters for months, was founded by Bryan Salesky, a multi-year veteran of Google's self-driving team, and Peter Rander, who led autonomous efforts at Uber up until September 2016. Ford's goal is to tap into Argo AI's expertise to help establish the car company as a leader in the autonomous space. The deal effectively means Ford is buying Argo and taking a majority stake in the company, though Ford is framing the deal as an investment instead of an acquisition. "From an accounting standpoint, [Argo AI] is a subsidiary," said Ford CEO Mark Fields today at an event in San Francisco.

Ford Motor Co. says it's investing $1 billion over the next five years in a Pittsburgh startup called Argo AI to develop the virtual-driver system for Ford's autonomous vehicles. Argo AI was founded only a few weeks ago by CEO Bryan Salesky, who directed hardware development for Google's self-driving cars; and chief operating officer Peter Rander, who led Uber's program to develop self-driving cars. Salesky and Rander, as well as other Argo AI executives, have worked on robotics and AI at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which helps explain the placement of the startup's headquarters. The technology coming out of the collaboration could be licensed to other companies, Ford President and CEO Mark Fields said today in a statement announcing the deal. "We believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford's leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future," Fields said.

Ford Motor is spending $1 billion to take over a robotics startup to acquire more of the expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021. The big bet announced Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University's robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander. Salesky formerly worked on self-driving cars at a high-profile project within Google -- now known as Waymo -- and Rander did the same kind of engineering at ride-hailing service Uber before the two men teamed up to launch Argo late last year. Argo had been considering whether to raise money from venture capitalists, the conventional fundraising channel for startups, before opting to become an independent subsidiary of Ford instead. Ford is spreading its $1 billion investment over a five-year period.

Ford Motor said Friday it will invest $1 billion over the next five years in a Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence company, Argo AI, to help put fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021 and to potentially license self-driving car technology to other companies. That in itself is pretty big news: major auto company plunks down huge money for robotics geeks to help it across the finish line on ambitious self-driving car project. But there's another very interesting aspect to the deal that shows Ford is serious about leading in the race to develop self-driving cars. With its $1 billion investment, Ford will become majority stakeholder in Argo AI, but the rest will be owned by Argo AI's cofounders, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, and their team, including a contingent of Ford software engineers who will leave Ford and become Argo AI employees. Giving those workers a piece of the company as a sweetener is seen as critical to attracting and retaining talent in the competition between traditional automakers and Silicon Valley to develop cars of the future.

Ford Motor is spending $1 billion to take over a robotics startup to acquire more of the expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021. The big bet announced Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University's robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander. Salesky formerly worked on self-driving cars at a high-profile project within Google -- now known as Waymo -- and Rander did the same kind of engineering at ride-hailing service Uber before the two men teamed up to launch Argo late last year. Argo had been considering whether to raise money from venture capitalists, the conventional fundraising channel for startups, before opting to become an independent subsidiary of Ford instead. Ford is spreading its $1 billion investment over a five-year period.