Autonomous Driving Company Roadstar.ai Fired One of its Co-founders
On Jan. 21st, the Chinese autonomous driving company Roadstar.ai announced the dismissal of one of its co-founders Zhou Guang. All relevant labor contracts have been terminated accordingly.
According to Zhou’s LinkedIn account, he served as Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Roadstar.ai since April in 2017.
The tempest occurred all of a sudden, yet to be confirmed by the other two co-founders, who now serve as CEO and CTO of Roadstar.ai. The three were colleagues in Baidu Research Institute USA.
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“Back then, we were all friends at Baidu Research Institute USA, and we didn’t care much about it. However, his (Zhou) shortages are exposed when it comes to conflicts of major interests in the long term.” CEO and CTO of Roadstar.ai said during an interview with Tech Sina.
According to the public statement, Zhou hasn’t followed the company’s internal coding management rules and regulations. During the delivery of one project, he was spotted by other co-workers taking the company’s confidential code and using technical reports based on fake files, which caused serious consequences to the company’s reputation and the progress of project delivery.
Zhou even faked data in a government regulatory report, which was later discovered by a third party institution.
He also practiced jobbery and collected kickbacks from his classmates in the Series A financing round, violating the company’s internal financial rules and regulations.
Founded in March 2017, Roadstar.ai has already received $110 million of financing in its Angel and series A rounds of financing. It now ranks second among all autonomous driving service companies in terms of financing.
According to its official website, Roadstar.ai has developed two key technologies, HeteroSync and DeepFusion. Integrating with multiple sensors including LiDARs, cameras, radars, GPS, IMU and so on, HeteroSync provides accurate time and spatial synchronization, real-time update and robust features extracted from the fused high-dimensional raw data. Taking the advantages of fused high-dimensional sensor data, DeepFusion produces a truly robust, efficient and safe autonomous driving solution.
Featured photo credit to roadstar.ai
