Travis Kalanick is trying to buy Pony.ai — and Uber might help

Uber’s founder is looking for ways to buy Travis Kalanjan Our arm of the Chinese autonomous vehicle company PoniAccording to the New York Times. Kalanik is reported to be working with investors for an acquisition, and Uber can even help the transaction, the Times said.

Pony Went public last year And before the New York Times report was released, there was a market cap of about $ 4.5 billion. According to the report that Poni began preparing its US arm for sale or spin -off in 2022 to create a “fork” version of its source code.

Ponnie will bring Kalanik back to the world of self-driving vehicles for the first time when he was pushed out of Uber in 2017.

Uber was then working on his own autonomous vehicle technology. In 2018, a test vehicle of it Killed a pedestrian in ArizonaThe Kalik’s replacement, Dara Khosavashi finally sold Uber’s self-driving department to Autrosty Autrara to autonomous trucking startup. Under Khosrvasahi, Uber has adopted a partnership method, brought a self-driving car on his platform from companies like Weemo.

Kalanik has adopted growing robotics in recent years while operating his Ghost Kitchen company CloudCiches. If he bought this Poni, he was still reported to have run to Cloudkichans day by day.

In March Says at an event At that time, Uber was “really behind WiMo but probably took it to Uber.” (Uber and Wemo finally lock in legal battles against trade privacy related to autonomous vehicles Settlement till the end.) Kalanik said about the Khosavasahi decision to sell the department: “I was not running the company when I did it, but you know, ‘I hope we had an autonomous ride sharing product right now. It will be great.”