A mysterious self-driving car company has been quietly expanding in recent years in the world's largest country. Now, Moscow-based Cognitive Technologies has hired a slew of new recruits and is ready to move to the U.S. in the coming months. "The big R&D center will stay in Russia, but the main engineers and business guys will be sent to U.S. soil to set up a proper office," Roman Tarasov, the company's VP for global business, tells Inverse. Cognitive Technologies was founded in 1993 by the guys who created Kaissa, the world's first computer chess champion. For decades it worked on image and voice recognition applications, selling products to Intel, Yandex, and others.