 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's 2018, we just got out of the CES show and all the Rages Autonomous Vehicles. You can't get away from it. That's what everybody's talking about. Tesla just announced their autonomous truck, their autonomous roadster. We're here in Palo Alto, right on San Antonio Road and Google X and Waymo's right up the street. So everyone's all about autonomous vehicles but we're excited to be here at Phantom Auto and they're taking a slightly different approach for a slightly different problem. We're excited to have Shay Maximoff. He is the co-founder and CEO of Phantom Auto. Shay, great to see you. Nice to see you too, yeah. So, Phantom Auto, you guys just got back from CES. You were given demos but you weren't stuck in like the little lane that was protected. You were actually driving people all over the streets. We were driving on the strip, yeah, yeah. We were actually, we were picking up people from the hotel lobby, you know. So we developed guys who would let us in with an empty vehicle. These videos are actually also online and we drove them off the strip and back to the hotel or to another destination. Okay, so you, but you're doing a whole different thing. So you do not have an autonomous vehicle here. It's not an autonomous vehicle. You are the ultimate chauffeur driven vehicle. Right, right. So again, for the show, we did our job to show that a vehicle can drive without a driver in the driver's seat but what we do is actually a safety solution for autonomous vehicles. Okay. And that safety is basically what happens if an autonomous vehicle, artificial intelligence doesn't work. I would say there is something that you cannot see or something that, you know, non-identified object, road construction areas, severe weather conditions. All this stuff happened all the time. Okay. And autonomous vehicles may struggle with this situation. So Phantom Auto provides a solution that we work with these companies, right? We provide them that solution that allows remote operation. Right, right. So a driver will connect remotely, yeah. So let's back up a couple steps. So autonomous vehicles are meant for no driver. You guys have a driver that you're really assisted driving with a person from a remote location. So how do you describe that in a short category? I'm sure the analysts want you to have a category. Yeah, yeah. The category would be the same way you think about air traffic control, right? Or any type of control center, like coal control centers, right? Like, you know, any type of support for customers, you would have a bunch of people sitting in front of computers. Right. This, in our case, is sitting in computers with steering wheels, which we'll see that later. And they can connect to a vehicle remotely. And when they move the steering wheel or press the gas or brake, it would actually happen in real time. Right. So we have this software that allows this real-time critical communication for autonomous vehicles. Now what's weird is when we first heard about you guys, I'm thinking, okay, what is the use case? Am I going to send the Phantom Auto to go pick up my 100-year-old grandfather who probably shouldn't be driving anymore? No. Where you're escorting it, but really it's a very different application. And I don't think most people understand that in autonomous vehicles, there's a whole lot of use cases still that they haven't quite figured out. My favorite one is when two of them pull up to a four-way stop and neither of them wants to go first. And they get stuck in a friendly lock, right? They get a favor logger. Some poor kid has his foot in the intersection and is trying to wave the car through it and won't go through. So it's corner cases that you guys are all about to really enable that next stage of machine learning for autonomous vehicles. Yeah, so when I started a company, right, I was, I'm a big believer in autonomous vehicle. I wanted to make them happen faster and sooner because it's a life-saving technology. This is gonna change the world. We all want it faster. Now, the reason why we're still not there yet is because there are many corner cases, edge cases, these situations where the machine didn't train enough for, right? Right. And in this situation, we provide a cover, right? So we have a person that would sit in an office. He doesn't have to be so close nearby. When we were in Vegas a couple of weeks ago, the driver was in Mountain View. So Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley, to Vegas. And he moved the steering wheel and he moves it a little time. But he's driving the car. Yeah. So one of the great knocks on cloud, right, is latency. And clearly the use case that's always brought up, right, is if you're in a self-driving car, you don't have time for the day to get it to the cloud and back to make a decision if a little ball rolls out into the street. So latency's a big issue. How do you guys deal with the latency issue? Well, that's our secret sauce, obviously, but I'm happy to share as much as I can. Yeah. The high level description would be we connect multiple networks at the same time. So we would usually have only AT&T in your cell phone, right? Or in your car. And then we have AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and a few networks, right? All of these together are bonded. And once they're bonded, you get a much stronger connection. It sounds maybe easy. Okay, so let's plug a few phones and get a really good connection. But it's much more complicated than that. We share and split the data across multiple networks at the same time. We prioritize the data. So like a break is very important, right? So if the remote operator is pressing the break, you want it to be first in the vehicle where the right side of the camera is not as critical, right? So lower latency for the break and then a little bit higher latency for something less important. Oh, so you've got dynamic kind of latency, actually. It's all dynamic real time. So that's what we do. That's our real core, right? We provide this communication, real time, critical layer of communication for the video streaming and back of the data from the remote operator back and forth all the time. Okay, so that's one big piece of it. Another big piece of it is the communications between the occupants and the vehicle and the driver. Another really important piece that, you know, obviously most people aren't thinking about for autonomous vehicles because they don't know that use case, but that's a pretty important piece of your solution. Yeah, that's a big one. I'd say that for this, I mean, you don't need to do a lot of innovation, right? It could be a simple call with a driver remotely, but we're all about safety, right? And we're all about giving passengers this even psychological trust, right? And it is true. You wanna sit in a car that drives 100% of the time, but you know, if I tell you that your car today, it would go in and it would drive only, you know, 95% of the time, would not buy this car, right? Same thing with autonomous vehicles. So we provide a safety and service layer. On the safety side, it's about assisting the vehicle when there is an emergency. It could be post-emergency or before it happens. I'd say you're just stuck in the middle of the lane and you don't know what happens. Even if the driver remotely wouldn't actually drive the car, you still wouldn't be able to talk to somebody, right? So I'd start with, you know, first the person, the driver, the human being would greet you when he enter a vehicle. It's an autonomous vehicle. He would say, hello. You know, how are you? Nice to meet you. My name is, you know, let's say Ben, right? Ben is going to be your driver soon. And Ben is going to tell you that whenever you need to, whenever you have a problem, if you need any assistance, he would be there for you. That already gives you like a whole different type of experience. And when you leave the vehicle to, he's not going to be there all the time engaged with the car. The car is going to drive on an autonomous, you know, AV system, right? But at least he's there in case you need him. Right. And again, the attention thing, which is an issue, you see with some of the test autonomous cars out there, where we were talking before we turned the cameras on, where the engineers like got his hands ready to grab the wheel if there's an emergency. That's not really Ben's role here. The car is going to take an evasive action in terms of emergency. Yeah, this is not a test driver. It's more to get out of this, out of like these weird quarter cases, as you said. Correct. It's not a test driver. Today, most of autonomous vehicle companies still require to amend it. It's actually legal. I mean, by the regs, you have to have a person in the car. Right, right. We also have a person in the car. And we do that same thing. Although, when Ben is driving, he's not replacing that person. He's just assisting when the autonomous vehicle system would have an issue. Right. So the next thing, I think, is pretty interesting about your company. As you said, you're a software company, but there's hardware components. You can see the back of the car, and we'll take some film of the driving station. But you use a lot of off-the-shelf, really simple hardware to execute this. There's Logitech, little steering wheels over there. It feels like a big video game. We've got the big Curve Samson screens, basic cameras on the car. Talk about the opportunity to build a software company, and you're leveraging somebody else's autonomous vehicle technology to really get in the middle of this with just software. Pretty cool opportunity. I tell you what, the best time in my life was earlier this year when I was just kind of putting this whole thing together. Because it was kind of plugging into the hardware and the software. I did it together with the team, also here in the office. And obviously it was more challenging because from a software person to try and build this hardware, it was more challenging. But I'd say today it's, I mean, you can get anything on Amazon. You buy on eBay at part you need and you plug it in and it will just work. So again, we did a lot of iteration. I'd say we spent a bit more money than we were supposed to. Of course. But now it works. Right. And then the last piece of the puzzle that I think is fascinating is the way that you're gonna integrate in with other people's autonomous vehicles. So again, we talked about Waymo up the street, the Google one, Uber's working on there as Volvo. Every day you read about BMW, et cetera, et cetera. So you really get to take advantage of those hardware systems, the sensor systems, the control systems, not only from those autonomous vehicles, but you're seeing now all this stuff that's coming in factory, right? Avoidance collision and radar and all types of sensors. So you will have to be able to take advantage of those different platforms, right? And integrate your system into those various platforms. Right. So we would work with the company. Let's say if it's a, you know, one of the big OEMs of right-sharing companies, we would know how their vehicle is set up. All we need for our solution to work is a bunch of cameras and a few modems, right? So cameras everybody have. It's one of the most essential things in an autonomous vehicle. Right, right. And we would just, you know, tag into these cameras, use the modems that we need for the software to run. And that's about it, right? So it's a pretty straightforward solution to allow remote control and assistance for autonomous vehicles. So I'm just curious when you're talking to customers or potential partners, what is the piece that really resonates with them when you kind of explain your solution and how it fits in with what they're trying to accomplish? Right, so our solution is, you know, really trying to help them reach market faster, right? So we're not replacing anybody's work, right? We're adding another layer of support and safety. So when your, you know, computer crash, when your software crash in the car, we're gonna be there, you know, with another redundancy system to support with the driver remotely. So that's what we do, you know, at the service level. Okay, so can we go take a drive? Yeah, sure, let's do it. We're gonna check out, we're gonna take a drive. We'll see you in the car. Thanks for watching.