Amazon announced this week that it had bought Startup Zoox led by Senegalese Aichatou Sar Evans for $ 1.2 billion. According to the Wall street Journal, the acquisition of the company which aims to develop autonomous driving technology will allow Amazon to be ahead of its new delivery strategy.

“Zoox will continue to exist as a standalone business and the overall mission of their business will also remain the same,” Amazon said in the release.
Zoox chose one of the most expensive routes in the autonomous driving industry, seeking to build an autonomous passenger vehicle adapted to its needs, as well as the software and AI to provide its autonomous driving capabilities.

Here Is What You Need To Know

• By buying the Zoox startup, Amazon also aims to compete with Google in the field of autonomous cars. The idea is to be able to push the startup to gain the track it needs to follow its main rival — Waymo, which is behind the autonomous car project of Google.
• Amazon has worked on its own autonomous vehicle technology projects, the last-mile delivery robots, which are six-wheeled sidewalk robots designed to transport small packages to customers.
• The delivery company also invested in the autonomous driving startup Aurora and tested autonomous trucks powered by the autonomous freight start-up Embark.
• The acquisition of Zoox is specifically aimed at helping the startup “concretize its vision of autonomous transport”, according to Amazon, so that this does not seem to be immediately focused on Amazon logistics operations for package delivery.
• Meanwhile, if Zoox really stays on the path of passenger transportation, it could open up a whole new market for Amazon. A market that would put it in competition with Uber and Lyft once the autonomous driving technology matures.
• To date, Zoox has raised more than $750 million in venture funding.

Read also: Pan-African Fund AfricInvest IV Secures $30m From Proparco For Investments In African SMEs

A Look At Zoox

• Founded in 2014, startup Zoox has achieved notable cost reductions over the past year, recruiting former CEO Evans of INTEL in 2019 with the aim of leveraging her experience to help the company move towards commercialization.
• Since the advent of autonomous cars, Zoox has always innovated in this sector with very competitive strategies. The company planned not only to develop autonomous driving software, but also to build its own vehicles and create a support service. As early as 2018, the company intended to launch a fully autonomous taxi service by 2020. This served as a bait to lure giant Amazon, which was feeling a bit slow in its car projects. autonomous.

A Look At The Senegalese Aicha Sar Evans

Aichatou Sar Evans’ engagement at Zoox followed the firing of Zoox co-founder and former CEO Tim Kentley-Klay in August 2018. According to Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson, he and the board of directors believed “that to take the company through the next stage and to scale the company, we thought finding someone with executive and operational experience would be helpful to the company,” he told TechCrunch in January 2019.

Before joining Zoox as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Evans was Intel’s chief strategy officer, where she spent 12 years. A graduate of George Washington University, 51 year-old Evans, is a native of Senegal who has lived in France; Israel; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Ore.; and Austin, Texas, before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012.

“I earned the right in my career not to work with a — holes,” Evan said in an interview with Marketwatch. “It is normal for human beings to have trepidation about technology. I consider myself a balanced engineer who talks as much about the personal side.”

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer