rideOS, a technology platform designed to accelerate the safe, global roll-out of self-driving vehicles, raised $9 million in Series A funding. Sequoia Capital led the round with participation from Graph Ventures and SV Angel, and Sequoia Partner Mike Vernal has joined rideOS’s board of directors. In tandem, the company has announced its partnership with Ford-owned Autonomic to address key challenges in the area of self-driving vehicle technology.

rideOS was started in June 2017 by two founding members of Uber’s Advanced Technology Division on mapping and self-driving vehicle technology. rideOS CEO Justin Ho was formerly the Head of Strategy for Uber’s ATD, and rideOS CTO Chris Blumenberg served as Head of Map Services at Uber. Before their time at Uber, Ho worked as an investor with Citadel Investment Group and Goldman Sachs and Blumenberg was a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple. Both were passionate about bringing self-driving vehicles to market in a safe way, so they built rideOS to be a platform-agnostic distributor of critical information across fleets.

The rideOS platform provides a broad set of products and services that can be used as building blocks for developing on-demand self-driving services. Its core services operate in real-time through the cloud and include autonomous vehicle routing, estimated time of arrival (ETA) calculations, dispatch, supply positioning, multi-rider trip planning, and fleet management dashboards.

Autonomic, which was acquired by Ford Smart Mobility in 2018 and is a wholly owned subsidiary, created the first open cloud-based mobility platform that connects and empowers mobility systems with the goal of creating a safer and more sustainable transportation network. Autonomic’s Transportation Mobility Cloud allows developers and automakers, in addition to Ford, to connect diverse components of urban mobility systems such as vehicles, mass transit, pedestrians, city infrastructure, and service providers. Through the TMC, rideOS can offer routing and marketplace services to Autonomic’s OEM customers, such as Ford. The partnership will allow both companies to build more robust platforms to accelerate the safe rollout of connected vehicle technology.

rideOS will use the latest funding for recruiting, platform research and development, and additional partnerships.

There are dozens of teams focused on bringing a single self-driving car to market. rideOS is focused on what happens next—what you need to enable a fleet of self-driving vehicles. Their technology has a true network effect—every car that plugs into their network makes every other rideOS car safer and more efficient.

—Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia and rideOS board member