00:00So you're in a very capital-intensive development space of stage right now.
00:04What are you planning to do with it?
00:06Well, the fundraise that you're referring to is really a reflection of the momentum we're seeing in the business.
00:11This year, we're launching four customer-funded pilots,
00:15and next year, we're launching our first commercial systems around the world.
00:19How viable is your technology right now, especially as opposed to, say, open and on-the-road autonomous vehicles?
00:28That's a great question.
00:29So open-road robo-taxis that we see a lot in the United States, and certainly in China,
00:34I mean, they're really exploding there.
00:36To us, those are AV 1.0, because, Sherry, an autonomous vehicle stuck in traffic is just a car stuck
00:41in traffic.
00:42And if you deploy hundreds or even thousands of autonomous vehicles, robo-taxis, on congested streets,
00:48you're just going to make congestion worse.
00:49What we think is that autonomous vehicles, AV 1.0, are just a stepping stone to putting those vehicles
00:57on purpose-built flow networks.
00:59And that's what Glideways does.
01:01We build flow networks.
01:02We're a new mobility system that is designed around continuous movement instead of traffic.
01:07And so you don't stop.
01:08You don't transfer.
01:09You don't sit in congestion.
01:10You go directly to where you want to go.
01:12And because Glideways is built as a network rather than a collection of vehicles,
01:16we deliver far greater throughput capacity at a fraction of the cost.
01:21And that's why cities around the world are deploying it.
01:23And you're talking about cities, especially metropolis.
01:26Is that why you're here in Japan?
01:28I know that you have a lot of Japanese partners as well.
01:31We do.
01:32We're in Japan, and we're in the Middle East, and in South Asia, and in India, and various other places,
01:37because the through line around the different markets around the world is that people are realizing,
01:41not just cities, private developers, airports, we have lots of different kinds of customers,
01:46they're all realizing the same thing.
01:48And that is that trying to manage traffic is a losing battle.
01:51Our mobility systems today, whether they're subways, buses, or cars,
01:55are all based on the concept of interruption.
01:58Well, that's not going to work.
01:59We need something that scales infinitely, and that's what a flow network is.
02:03Now, Japan is very special for us.
02:05Japan is a market not only where people understand first principles thinking here
02:09and system design thinking, but some of our most important strategic partners are in Japan, too.
02:14Let me give you one example.
02:16Suzuki.
02:16Suzuki is an incredible company.
02:18They're over 100 years old.
02:20They have more engineering and manufacturing acumen than a company like ours will ever have.
02:24So they're not just part of our scale plan.
02:26They're core to our strategic execution globally.
02:29And that's why we're in Japan.
02:31Now, let's talk about the Middle East for a second.
02:33The Middle East is all about ambition.
02:35The governing philosophy in the Middle East is leapfrogging.
02:37They don't ask the question, how can I manage traffic?
02:40They ask the question, how can I leapfrog traffic altogether?
02:43And so the same through line is what we're seeing all over the world,
02:46in the United States as well and in parts of India.
02:50Do you have a target in terms of how many cars you're targeting to manufacture per year
02:54or per project with Suzuki?
02:59We don't actually have a target because we don't think about it as individual vehicles.
03:03We're providing a flow network, and a flow network is a system.
03:06When you're thinking about AV 1.0, that's a question of how many vehicles are out there.
03:11But when you think about flow networks, AV 2.0, the winners are not the people who build the vehicles.
03:16The winners are those who control the networks.
03:19And we provide the network layer.
03:21That's how we think about ourselves.
03:22And so we care about how many people can we move quickly and help decongest streets.
03:28You know, one of the things that we've learned and that we can all relate to is that traffic is
03:32a quiet filter.
03:33It's kind of a repressant on human potential.
03:36And we want to relieve that.
03:38And the best way to relieve that is to provide better access to mobility because for that, you get better
03:43access to economic opportunity.
03:44And that thought, that fundamental mission statement that we have, aligns very well with cities and private developers
03:51whose mandates are congestion relief and, of course, emissions relief.
03:56You touched on the Middle East as another key market.
04:00And I know that you've just wrapped up a trip there.
04:02Given the ongoing geopolitical uncertainties, the uncertainty of the war, can I get a bit of insight in terms of
04:08what sort of investor sentiment,
04:10what risk appetite felt like while you were there?
04:16Certainly.
04:17It was quite extraordinary.
04:18If I can take a step back, what we're seeing in the Middle East right now and what I saw
04:22over my trip during the last two weeks there is, frankly, business as usual.
04:26Ambition is extremely high.
04:28They're trying to remove roadblocks, no pun intended, to getting our product out there.
04:33We're launching our first trial there in September this year.
04:36So things are moving along and they're pushing us to move as fast as we can.
04:44What do you see as being the major competition?
04:47I know China is obviously one of them.
04:49Are there sort of lessons learned when it comes to that market, which is in a lot of ways quite
04:54a pioneer market for a lot of this new technology, right?
04:57Do you think there are things that have been achieved in that market that can be replicated or similar types
05:03of momentum be achieved in other markets?
05:08What's happening in China is extraordinary.
05:10I mean, autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles are indeed exploding.
05:14But I think we have to take a step back, which is that the autonomous vehicle is an extraordinary piece
05:20of equipment.
05:21It's an amazing, revolutionary new technology.
05:23And if I may, the example I like to think of is the Internet, which when it was invented some
05:2830 or so years ago, was a revolutionary technology.
05:31But like robotaxis, when you try to take a revolutionary technology and fit it onto an existing infrastructure, an existing
05:38roadway built for human riders, and the Internet at that time was fit onto copper wires built for human voice,
05:44you constrain it.
05:45You really have to think bigger.
05:46You have to take this revolutionary technology and put it on something new that really releases the full potential of
05:53an autonomous vehicle, a robotaxi, which is one of experience, so you don't have to sit in congestion.
05:58One of capacity, you have to move more people in less space.
06:01And, of course, one of economics.
06:03So in the same way the Internet was unconstrained when it was moved from copper wires built for voice to,
06:09let's say, fiber optic, autonomous vehicles really are the stepping stone to AV 2.0, where you take those vehicles
06:15and you orchestrate them very carefully on a dedicated flow network.
06:19And that's what our customers around the world, which are both cities and private developers and airports, big and small,
06:24are starting to see.
06:25And we're trying to catch up to demand.
06:27How challenging are the regulatory hurdles, especially between jurisdictions?
06:32That's such a great question.
06:33For us, because we're eliminating the, let's call it the infinity problem of guessing what a human driver is going
06:40to do or a bicyclist or a pedestrian who's maybe going to cross the road or maybe going to get
06:44into their car, an autonomous vehicle, AV 1.0, has to account for all of that.
06:50And so the regulatory framework is really tough.
06:52For us, we find that regulatory frameworks are actually an enabler because we eliminate most of those uncertainties.
06:58We have dedicated lanes and nobody can walk on them.
07:01And so for us, we find that our regulatory frameworks align to the mandates that cities have when we talk
07:06about cities as a customer, which are, again, reducing traffic and reducing emissions.
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