This Startup Wants to Build Self-Driving Car Software—Super Fast

For the last year and a half, two hacked white Tesla Model 3 sedans each loaded with five extra cameras and one palm-sized supercomputer have quietly cruised around San Francisco. In a city and era swarming with questions about the capabilities and limits of artificial intelligence, the startup behind the modified Teslas is trying to answer what amounts to a simple question: How quickly can a company build autonomous vehicle software today?

The startup, which is making its activities public for the first time today, is called HyprLabs. Its 17-person team (just eight of them full-time) is divided between Paris and San Francisco, and the company is helmed by an autonomous vehicle company veteran, Zoox cofounder Tim Kentley-Klay, who suddenly exited the now Amazon-owned firm in 2018. Hypr has taken in relatively little funding, $5.5 million since 2022, but its ambitions are wide-ranging. Eventually, it plans to build and ...