Travis Kalanick is trying to buy Pony AI — and Uber might help

The founder of Uber Travis Kalanick is looking for ways to buy the US Distrum of Chinese Autombo vehicle poneAccording to the New York Times. Kalanick would work with investors to finance an acquisition, and Uber could even help to make the transaction occur, reports Times.

Pony became a public last year And had a market capitalization of approximately $ 4.5 billion before the publication of the New York Times report. The report indicates that Pony began to prepare its American arm for a sale or a fallout in 2022, until the creation of a “forked” version of its source code.

The acquisition of Pony AI would bring Kalanick for the first time in the world of autonomous vehicles since it was expelled from Uber in 2017.

Uber worked on its own autonomous vehicle technology at the time. In 2018, one of its test vehicles Killed a pedestrian in Arizona. The replacement of Kalanick, Dara Khosrowshahi, finally sold Uber’s autonomous division at the Aurora autonomous truck startup. Under Khosrowshahi, Uber has adopted a partnership approach, bringing autonomous cars to its company platform like Waymo.

Kalanick has increasingly adopted robotics in recent years while directing its ghost cooking company Cloudkitchens. He was still going to manage Cloudkitchens from day to day if he bought Pony ai.

In March, Kalanick said during an event This Uber was “really only behind Waymo but probably catching up” when he was pushed to Uber. (Uber and Waymo were finally locked in a legal battle on autonomous trade secrets linked to vehicles that were finally set.) Regarding Khosrowshahi’s decision to sell the division, Kalanick said: “I did not direct the company when it happened, but you know, you could say:” I would like us to have an autonomous driving sharing product at the moment. It would be great. “”