LiDAR has been a cornerstone of autonomous vehicle and robotics industries. While it’s become an industry standard, the technology has its drawbacks. Chief among them is high cost.

As the former CTO and CEO of LiDAR leader Velodyne, Anand Gopalan is aware of the tech’s pluses and minuses. It’s telling, then, that the executive’s latest undertaking opted to skip out on the tech altogether. In fact, Vayu Robotics is positioning LiDAR-free navigation as one of its biggest selling points.

Co-founded in 2022 by Gopalan — two years after taking Velodyne public via SPAC — Vayu Robotics is working to make delivery robotics cheaper and more scalable. Ditching LiDAR is a piece of that puzzle. Instead, the company has embraced foundation models: the machine learning technology at the heart of the recent generative AI explosion.

“The traditional mobile robotics approach involved putting multiple sensors on a robot (often at great cost) and then writing software in the form of modules that are built to do one task at a time,” Gopalan writes in a press release. “This leads to very expensive sensors and compute, combined with very brittle software that cannot deal with uncertainty or new situations.

“Instead we have taken an approach that involves a transformer based mobility foundation model combined with a new type of powerful passive sensor that does away with the need for lidar especially in low speed applications.”

Delivery robots are Vayu’s first step. It’s a large — and growing — industry, albeit one that has run into plenty of pitfalls along the way. The company has drummed up interest from investors, including Khosla Ventures, bringing its to-date raise to $12.7 million.

More importantly, however, it’s  signed “a substantial commercial agreement with a large e-commerce player to deploy 2500 robots to enable ultra-fast goods delivery, with similar commercial customers in the pipeline.” The company has yet to disclose the specifics of that deal, though the substantial figure signals a company that has moved beyond the pilot stage.

Another differentiator is Vayu’s on-road approach to delivery — a change from the standard, slow-moving sidewalk robots that have thus far been deployed by companies. The company says its system is capable of moving a 100-pound payload at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour.

“The unique set of technologies we have developed at Vayu have allowed us to solve problems that have plagued delivery robots over the past decade, and finally create a solution that can actually be deployed at scale and enable the cheap transport of goods everywhere,” Gopalan notes.