Starsky Robotics Inc. is no more. The self-driving truck startup announced today that it’s closing down after failing to secure additional funding.

Founded in 2015, Starsky Robotics had been developing driverless truck technology that involved a combination of self-driving technology and remote control, a different take than others in the market. In its short time, the company, in 2016 was the first to make a paid vehicle delivery without a person behind the wheel and in 2018 delivered its first unmanned truck run.

That run in 2018 was described by the company as the first successful field test of a truly driverless truck at the time. Although the truck did not have an operator in the cabin, human drivers were involved but only in supervising the truck remotely. They took control of the vehicle when it maneuvered at low speeds or encountered a difficult situation, though the company said only a limited amount of input was required.

Although the technology sounded promising, in a crowded marketplace full of autonomous vehicle startups, that wasn’t enough to save it.

“Timing, more than anything else, is what I think is to blame for our unfortunate fate,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Stefan Seltz-Axmacher wrote on Medium. “Our approach, I still believe, was the right one but the space was too overwhelmed with the unmet promise of AI to focus on a practical solution.”

“As those breakthroughs failed to appear, the downpour of investor interest became a drizzle,” Seltz-Axmacher added. “It also didn’t help that last year’s tech IPOs took a lot of energy out of the tech industry, and that trucking has been in a recession for 18 or so months.”

Interestingly, Seltz-Axmacher claims that there are broader issues at play in the autonomous vehicle space with the biggest being that supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. “It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool,” Seltz-Axmacher claimed.

Before shutting operations, Starsky Robotics had raised $20.3 million in funding, including a $16.5 million Series A round in 2018. Investors included Shasta Ventures, Trucks Venture Capital, Fifty Years, Hemi Ventures, Unshackled Ventures and several individual investors.

Image: Starsky Robotics