#Interview
At driveblocks everything revolves around autonomous driving. “After evaluating various use cases with customers and partners, we decided to focus on the off-road market,” says founder Alexander Wischnewski.
driveblocks from Garching near Munich, founded in 2022 by Alexander Wischnewski, Stephan Matz, Leonhard Hermansdorfer, Thomas Herrmann, Tim Stahl, Felix Nobis and Markus Lienkamp, focuses on “autonomous driving in the off-road sector” (agricultural machinery, construction machinery but also defense).
The Dutch IndustrialTech investor FORWARD.one, Bayern Kapital, Rethink Ventures and former MAN boss Joachim Drees recently invested 3.5 million euros in the company. The team has now collected a total of 7.5 million.
In an interview with deutsche-startups.de, founder Wischnewski presents his company in detail.
How would you explain driveblocks to your grandmother?
driveblocks develops software and artificial intelligence to allow off-road vehicles to drive independently without human help.
Was this your concept from the beginning?
We have had a strong focus on autonomous driving for the commercial vehicle market since the beginning. After evaluating various use cases with customers and partners, we decided to focus on the off-road market. This is where our technological approach can show its strengths and we can generate the greatest added value for customers.
How has driveblocks developed since it was founded?
driveblocks currently has 17 employees and will grow significantly with the new financing.
Most recently you were able to collect 3.5 million. How did you get in touch with your investors?
We offer a DeepTech product in the robotics market. We therefore had contact with all of our investors well before the actual investment and they accompanied our development for a while. It has always been important to us to bring partners on board who have a good understanding of the market and technology.
Please take a look back: What really went wrong in the last few years?
Autonomous driving is often underestimated in its complexity. It is an interdisciplinary problem involving computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and artificial intelligence. We have been operating in this environment for almost 10 years – and have learned again and again that every sub-component must be tested down to the last detail. And that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
And where have you done everything right so far?
The constant focus on testing in real environments has always been a success factor for us in the past. Only there can you get the feedback on the usability and maturity of the technology that you need to develop a reliable product. And it is often the many, seemingly small issues that distinguish a robust solution from a prototype.
Where will driveblocks be in a year?
Our priority is currently to bring the first systems into series use. These are initially systems that have to meet no or only very low security requirements. These help us to build an ever larger data pool, improve the AI algorithms and ultimately advance into more complex use cases.
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