Would you be surprised to learn that a number of autonomous vehicle development programs offload data from their test vehicles by physically pulling out a hard drive and shipping it by snail mail to a cloud services provider? When Jason Stinson, the co-founder of the AV ecosystem company Renovo, told me this was common enough for his company to offer a more advanced data offloading system from their in-house tool kit as a product, I was certainly blown away. As the venture capital community's appetite for massive investments in AV developers wanes, companies that were floating on easily-raised cash are going to have to turn their science experiments into something more closely resembling actual business operations and companies like Renovo are helping them professionalize. On this week's Merge Now, Stinson shares Renovo's unique perspective as partner to countless companies in the autonomous drive space to shed light on this fascinating transition.
