The autonomous driving software startup Ghost Autonomy Inc., which had raised almost $220 million in venture capital funding, has given up the ghost and closed its business.

The startup posted a short message on its website today saying it has “shut down worldwide operations and wound down the company as of April 3, 2024.”

The decision to shut down comes as a surprise, as Ghost Autonomy, which employed around 100 people at its offices in Mountain View, Dallas and Sydney, had recently announced what looked as though it could be a breakthrough partnership with OpenAI. The startup managed to secure $5 million from the OpenAI Startup Fund in November, and with that it also gained access to Azure computing resources from Microsoft Corp. That came just months after the company closed on an unannounced $55 million funding round in August.

Having secured the backing of OpenAI, Ghost Autonomy’s co-founder and Chief Executive John Hayes told TechCrunch that the company was planning to experiment with the use of multimodal large language models in self-driving car applications. He said LLMs could help autonomous driving systems to enhance their reasoning skills beyond what existing systems are capable of.

The decision to focus on LLMs came after the company failed to deliver on its earlier goal of creating a software kit that would enable privately owned, non-autonomous passenger vehicles to drive autonomously on highways. Ghost launched in 2019 with $63.7 million in funding, and promised that its technology would be delivered in 2020, but it failed to meet that deadline.

Later, in 2021, Ghost raised $100 million and said it was switching its focus to crash prevention technology with its universal collision avoidance system. At the time, Hayes told TechCrunch that the company had made the decision to build a simpler technology so it could get to market faster.

In an email to TechCrunch today, Hayes revealed that the system was already being tested in urban environments. However, the startup had failed to secure enough funding to bring the product to market. But there is hope that its innovations may live on in some other form.

“The path to long-term profitability was uncertain given the current funding climate and long-term investment required for autonomy development and commercialization,” the startup said in its statement. “We are exploring potential long-term destinations for our team’s innovations.”

Image: Ghost Autonomy