Exclusive: Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors

Starsky Robotics’ main competitors have snapped up nearly 85% of its engineers.

Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics failed to find buyer, new investors. Photo: Starsky Robotics

Autonomous trucking startup Starsky Robotics has laid off the majority of its engineers and office personnel after its fundraising efforts and attempts to find a buyer failed, a former executive says.

A skeleton crew remains at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco as Starsky co-founders Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, chief executive officer, and Kartik Tiwari, chief technology officer, continue to seek a buyer for the four-year startup.

Since 2017, Starsky had raised more than $20.3 million, including $16.5 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures in March 2018, according to Crunchbase. However, the startup failed to secure additional funding since the last round nearly two years ago.

Seltz-Axmacher and Tiwari did not respond to FreightWaves’ requests for comment regarding the mass layoffs at Starsky.

Approximately 85% of the company’s engineers have secured new jobs with its competitors in the self-driving space, including Waymo, Cruise and TuSimple, according to Paul Schlegel, former senior vice president of Starsky. His last day was Jan. 31.

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    7 Comments

    1. F Starsky

      Paul is responsible for all of this. He had one girl not only dispatching but trying to find loads
      for 40 drivers while I was there. All of them broker loads. I couldn’t get the F out of there quick
      enough. This is what happen when you think you can just buy your way in to an industry you know zero
      about and then trust a guy from Schneider of all places to make it happen for you. Took me a long
      time to recover financially from dealing with these morons. Karma Baby

    2. Dean

      Real truck drivers are overworked and underpaid I started otr in 1964 drove until 2016. I love to drive trucks have seen deregulation destroy most of the trucking companies along with the price of fuel going from 18 cents a gallon to $3 a gallon.Now they want to revive the only person that is doing all the manual labor. I’m sad to see the industry I love being destroyed by those people that don’t even drove a truck.If you’re never driven a truck you should not be making these decisionsThank You

    3. David

      I was one of the otr drivers up until the week before Thanksgiving when they fired me. They first told me that they wanted to discuss their and my expectations of each other (had been having some friction because they frequently booked loads through ch Robinson and they kept setting appointments that were very difficult to meet, safely). After parking truck and trailer at the lot they rented space at in Dallas and taking an uber to the office they rented space at, they fired me because of “to many hard brake alerts”, I had a few but as I showed via personal dashcam footage it was nessicary to not kill someone. They wouldn’t listen.

      If freightwaves wants to hear more about my experience as an otr driver for starsky or them “firing” (I’m betting they did so in that Way to get out of paying unemployment) me, feel free to contact me.

    4. CA Trucker

      Practical application of this technology is still quite a ways off. Companies in this space better have a long-term approach and patient investors.

    Comments are closed.

    Clarissa Hawes

    Clarissa has covered all aspects of the trucking industry for 18 years. She is an award-winning journalist known for her investigative and business reporting. Before joining FreightWaves, she wrote for Land Line Magazine and Trucks.com. If you have a news tip or story idea, send her an email to chawes@firecrown.com or @cage_writer on X, formerly Twitter.