May Mobility

Market position

The company frames its architecture as distinct from both modular AV stacks and pure end-to-end models used elsewhere in the industry, emphasizing lower deployment cost and faster expansion into new markets. It was named to Fast Company's 2026 list of the World's Most Innovative Companies.

Rather than relying on having seen scenarios in advance, vehicles reason through the current scene in real time, refreshing understanding every 200 milliseconds and rejecting candidate strategies that fail safety checks. The company argues this yields traceable decision-making, generalization to new geographies without billions of training miles, and deployment at a fraction of the capital other AV systems require.

Technology

The autonomy system combines a predictive world model with a real-time multi-policy reasoning engine. The world model builds an understanding of the current scene from physics, traffic rules and pedestrian/driver interaction conventions, and every 200 milliseconds simulates hundreds of possible futures up to 10 seconds ahead. The reasoning engine assembles multiple candidate driving strategies, including ones from deep-learned models, scores each against the simulated futures, rejects any that fail safety parameters, and hands control to the winner, making each action traceable to its source. The company describes Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) as a real-time, reinforcement-learning approach that is not bounded by pre-collected training data and that generalizes to new geographies and road types with smaller models, lower-cost compute and less city-specific data than modular AV stacks or pure end-to-end models. Vehicles carry a combined sensor stack of LiDAR, radar and cameras for 360-degree coverage. In May 2026 the company announced a fifth-generation AV architecture built around the world model.

Go-to-market

The 2023 Series D announcement described a business-to-government and business-to-business go-to-market strategy intended to reach profitability faster through a lean, capital-efficient structure relative to other AV companies. The company markets directly to transit agencies, cities, campuses, healthcare systems, airports, corporate campuses and planned communities, and distributes rides through partner platforms including Lyft and Uber. In Japan, NTT holds exclusive rights to distribute the company's AV technology.

Transit agencies, cities and states, college campuses, healthcare organizations, airports, corporate campuses, planned communities, and ride-hail platform partners; end riders in dense urban, suburban and rural communities.

Geography

Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Services and pilots across the United States (Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Indiana, Arizona, Minnesota, Georgia, California) and Japan (Hiroshima University campus, Tokyo public roads, a Toyota plant in Fukuoka). Planned expansion into Southeast Asia from 2026 subject to regulation, and a stated partnership to pursue robotaxi expansion in Europe with CaoCao. The Series D proceeds were earmarked for the U.S., Canada and Japan.

History

Founded in 2017 by Edwin Olson, Alisyn Malek and Steve Vozar and part of Y Combinator that year. First service launched in Detroit in June 2018 with electric shuttles for Bedrock and Quicken Loans employees, followed by a Smart Columbus shuttle in Ohio. A $11.5 million seed extension closed in December 2018 with BMW iVentures and Toyota AI Ventures. Services launched in Providence, Rhode Island and Grand Rapids, Michigan in mid-2019, with the latter converted to on-demand transit in 2021. Arlington RAPID launched in Texas in 2021, alongside pilots in Indianapolis and Fishers, Indiana, and the first Japanese operations at Hiroshima University via a SoftBank partnership. A $111 million Series C led by Mirai Creation Fund closed in July 2022; a $105 million Series D led by NTT was announced in November 2023. A rider-only service without onboard attendants launched in Sun City, Arizona in December 2023, a driverless public service in Peachtree Corners, Georgia in February 2025, an Uber platform partnership in May 2025, Atlanta robotaxis with Lyft in September 2025, and a Grab investment and Southeast Asia expansion in October 2025.