Uber founder Travis Kalanick is looking for ways to buy the U.S. arm of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony AI, according to The New York Times. Kalanick is reportedly working with investors to finance an acquisition, and Uber may even help make the transaction happen, the Times reports.
Pony AI went public last year and had a market cap of around $4.5 billion before The New York Times report was published. The report states that Pony started preparing its U.S. arm for a sale or spinoff in 2022, down to creating a “forked” version of its source code.
Acquiring Pony AI would bring Kalanick back into the world of self-driving vehicles for the first time since he was pushed out of Uber in 2017.
Uber was working on its own autonomous vehicle technology at that time. In 2018, one of its test vehicles killed a pedestrian in Arizona. Kalanick’s replacement, Dara Khosrowshahi, ultimately sold Uber’s self-driving division to autonomous trucking startup Aurora. Under Khosrowshahi, Uber has taken a partnership approach, bringing self-driving cars onto its platform from companies like Waymo.
Kalanick has increasingly embraced robotics in recent years while running his ghost kitchen company CloudKitchens. He would reportedly still run CloudKitchens day-to-day if he purchased Pony AI.
In March, Kalanick said at an event that Uber was “really only behind Waymo but probably catching up” at the time that he was pushed out of Uber. (Uber and Waymo eventually got locked in a legal battle over autonomous vehicle-related trade secrets that was ultimately settled.) Regarding Khosrowshahi’s decision to sell the division, Kalanick said: “I wasn’t running the company when that happened, but you know, you could say, ‘Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product right now. That would be great.’”