In 2018, Thomas von der Ohe and Fabrizio Scelsi saw a gap in the mobility landscape that no one else was addressing. Thomas had launched Zoox's first self-driving vehicle on public streets in Silicon Valley and helped bring Amazon's first Echo to market. Fabrizio had spent years building electric vehicles and autonomous shuttles across Europe and the US. Together with Bogdan Djukic, they realized that fully autonomous driving was still decades away from mainstream adoption - but the technology to remotely operate vehicles safely and efficiently existed right now. So they founded Vay (originally named Ree Technology) in Berlin to pioneer a new category: remote-driven mobility services.
Today, Vay operates the world's first commercially available remotely driven car rental service, live on public streets in Las Vegas, Nevada. Through the Vay app, users request an electric vehicle that arrives at their doorstep driven remotely by a professionally trained teledriver from a Remote Driving Station. After the user takes the wheel and completes their trip, a remote driver parks the car - eliminating the hassle of parking entirely. With over 50,000 trips completed, Vay is proving that you don't need to wait for full autonomy to revolutionize urban transportation. The company has raised over $200 million from investors including Grab, Kinnevik, Coatue, Atomico, and General Catalyst, and is expanding across the US and Europe with B2B applications for autonomous trucking, car sharing, and commercial vehicle fleets.
