Carmera wins one-year membership to the PlanetM Landing Zone in pitch competition focused on AV tech

New York-based street-level intelligence platform Carmera took home a one-year membership to the PlanetM Landing Zone on Monday after winning the first of three pitch competitions sponsored by Techstars Mobility at the 2018 North American International Auto Show.

Their category, autonomy and control systems, focused on sensors and smart infrastructure solutions specifically for autonomous and connected vehicles.

“It felt great to win,” said Carmera CEO Ro Gupta. “We’re pretty confident about what we do and we’ve got a talented team.”

The real-time 3-D maps and navigation data provider was also awarded “Best in Show” and “Startup of the Year” at the inaugural PlanetM Awards ceremony.

Gupta credits the company’s success to the challenging work of his team.

“I will say it was unexpected to win all of the things considering there are so many high-quality companies here,” he said. “But I think a big reason we were successful is because we just announced the largest autonomous taxi deployment in the world. That’s something that is unique. It’s real and I think people picked up on that.”

Carmera is one of 100 technology startups exhibiting at AutoMobili-D.

Gupta spoke highly of the experience and said he looks forward to coming back to the auto show in coming years.

“Beyond obviously being a nexus for meeting with OEMs, tier one suppliers and other startups, we really appreciated the focus on the representation of research at AutoMobili-D,” Gupta said.

Carmera beat out four other autonomous vehicle startups including 21GigaWatts (Israel), Apollo (Portland, Ore.), PolySync (Portland, Ore.) and May Mobility (Ann Arbor, Mich.) in their pitch.