Twists On The Road To Robotaxi Revolution: Zoox Fires Its Founding CEO

One month after stealthy startup Zoox raised $500 million to accelerate development of its futuristic electric robotaxis, the company unexpectedly fired cofounder and CEO Tim Kentley-Klay, the man who began envisioning it six years ago.

Jesse Levinson, Kentley-Klay’s fellow cofounder and CTO, along with Zoox’s board, informed employees today of the development without detailing reasons for the move, a person familiar with the matter told Forbes. In the interim Carl Bass, a member of Zoox's board, will serve as executive chairman and assume Kentley-Klay’s responsibilities, and Levinson has been promoted to president, the person said. Bass was previously CEO of Autodesk.

Zoox will begin searching for a new CEO, the person said, without elaborating. The company declined to comment on the developments, which were reported earlier by Bloomberg. In a late Wednesday tweet Kentley-Klay said he was caught off-guard by the move.

“The shocking reality is that this morning—without a warning, cause or right of reply—the board fired me,” he wrote. “Today was Silicon Valley up to its worst tricks.” 

He eluded to a significant disagreement with the Zoox board, tweeting that it “chose a path of fear, optimizing for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the Universe.”

Kentley-Klay was a curious addition to the fast-developing world of autonomous vehicle technology. Rather than coming from an engineering or computer science background, he was an artist and designer based in Melbourne, Australia, who became obsessed with the potential for robotic driving after learning about the Google Self-Driving Car project in 2012, he told Forbes earlier this year.

"If this happens, it will be as big as when we went from the horse and carriage to the car,” Kentley-Klay said in a March 2018 interview.

Tim Kentley-Klay's statement on his ouster as CEO of Zoox:

His vision was for a new type of on-demand robot taxi that blended the most advanced aspects of autonomous driving tech being developed by Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo with the type of cutting-edge electric powertrain perfected by Tesla to serve customers in dense urban markets. Due in 2020, Zoox’s purpose-built vehicle is designed solely for use in a company-branded ride service, not individual ownership.

“Zoox is not trying to sell a better Tesla to a customer. It’s about a better experience,” he said in March. “Do I really like sitting in this vehicle? Do I want to do it again? Do I want to tell my friends? That’s the success we want.”

The $500 million from its Series B round in July boosted Zoox’s total fundraising to nearly $800 million and raised its valuation to more than $3 billion. Atlassian cofounder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, who personally invested $100 million in the Series B round, also joined the Zoox board in July.

“To raise that amount of capital in a company that is pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-customer is pretty unprecedented,” Kentley-Klay said last month. “It speaks to the quality of the team and the vision we have here and what we've been able to achieve.”

Zoox’s 500 employees, many recruited from Tesla, Google and Apple, moved into a new Foster City, California, headquarters earlier this year. And along with Levinson, a star artificial intelligence researcher from Stanford University, Zoox recruited former U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief Mark Rosekind to oversee development of its safety systems.

The final design of the Zoox robotaxi remains under wraps, but the company’s target is an electric vehicle with a roomy cabin—made more so by the absence of a steering wheel, brake and accelerator pedals and dashboard controls—that’s focused on rider comfort. Inside, passenger seats face each other, while outside the vehicle lacks defined front and rear ends. Patents filed with the U.S. government show Zoox plans to assemble the vehicle from four “quadrant” sections combined almost like Lego blocks.

A profile of Kentley-Klay and Zoox in May 2018 focused on the young company’s Wild Ride. Turns out it's been even wilder than anticipated.