Skip to main content

Plug and Play helps drive C/AV start-ups

US innovation platform will help Zenzic to accelerate likely products to market
By Adam Hill September 24, 2020 Read time: 2 mins
Innovation, acceleration: start-ups with good ideas will get help (© Pairoj Ponglerdnadda | Dreamstime.com)

Silicon Valley innovation platform Plug and Play is helping start-ups to develop their connected and autonomous vehicle (C/AV) technology in the UK.

The US outfit has joined with Zenzic - the organisation which aims to boost UK C/AV development - as part of the CAM Scale-Up Programme which seeks to give opportunities to likely candidates for testing and safety validating in various UK CAM Testbed facilities.
 
It will give promising start-ups and small firms access to a share of £500,000 in grant funding from the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles to help cover costs in accelerating their products to market.

Selected companies will be entered into Plug and Play’s portfolio management system, which offers expert mentoring, links to European and US corporate and venture capital partners, as well as the chance to present at a Plug and Play Summit to help generate inward investment.
 
Daniel Ruiz, CEO of Zenzic, said the programme "will enable SMEs and start-ups already working in these sectors to deliver their innovative products to market much faster, and facilitate SMEs in adjacent sectors to pivot solutions into this market". 
 
Seena Amidi, MD of Plug and Play, adds: "We are firm believers that innovation at scale can be achieved through partnerships between corporations, innovative startups, government and academia."
  
Companies interested in signing up can email their interest to [email protected]
 

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Yeti more AV snow-clearing by Semcon
    April 29, 2019
    There is a lot of debate about the place of autonomous vehicles on our roads – but a Swedish company is already ploughing ahead with driverless snow clearance on airport runways, writes David Arminas Femcon, a Swedish applied automation company, has started an on-site project to clear snow from runway landing lights using autonomous vehicles (AVs). Most often, this time-consuming job has to be done manually because of the intricate manoeuvres needed to avoid damaging the lighting systems. The trial pro
  • Venice lines up sustainable transport picks
    December 26, 2024
    Toyota Mobility Foundation's $9m Sustainable Cities Challenge continues
  • Wireless traffic data in real time
    January 31, 2012
    The effect of moving objects on the electromagnetic landscape set up by cellular telephony networks can be detected and interpreted to give real-time traffic data across large geographical areas at low cost. Here, we revisit the Celldar concept. Global economic downturn has pushed public-sector agencies, transport administrations among them, to push even harder for cost efficiencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to transport safety and efficiency the public sector often has to work up to a cost rather than
  • The benefit of Lidar: touch, don’t look
    September 28, 2020
    The benefits of Lidar as a safety device for automobiles rather than as an enabler for AVs are easy to overlook – but Dr Jun Pei of Cepton Technologies tells Adam Hill why that would be a big mistake