Global Brain has made an additional investment in Turing Inc., a startup that develops full self-driving vehicles and system by leveraging generative AI

Global Brain has made an additional investment in Turing Inc. (Turing), a startup that develops full self-driving vehicles and system by leveraging generative AI, through its GB-VIII Growth Fund Investment Limited Partnership (GB-VIII), KDDI Open Innovation Fund III (KOIF III), and JGC MIRAI Innovation Fund L.P. (JGC MIRAI Innovation Fund). This is a follow-on investment by GB-VIII and KOIF III, and the first investment by JGC MIRAI Innovation Fund.

Turing is a Japan-based startup that develops End-to-End (E2E) autonomous driving technology that conducts all necessary driving tasks: perception, prediction, decision, and control by only using visual data acquired by cameras. Turing has also been developing its original multi-modal generative AI “Heron” and will integrate it into autonomous driving systems that can make ethical decisions even under situations that do not exist in the past training data, aiming to realize level-5 full self-driving technologies that rule-based approaches cannot reach.

Since its establishment, Turing has been developing an autonomous driving AI system that can understand the world better than humans. In addition to releasing “Heron,” a multi-modal and multi-language generative AI in September 2023, the company successfully developed its concept car “Turing Falcon,” which was recently exhibited at the Japan Mobility Show 2023. Turing has also been selected for the “Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC),” the Japanese government’s AI project led by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). Through these achievements, Turing is increasingly drawing attention from the public.

Leveraging the money raised this round, Turing will build “Gaggle Cluster,” a large GPU cluster designed for updating “Heron”; conduct the “Tokyo 30” project, a road-legal demonstration of autonomous driving system to show its capabilities that it can run a vehicle without human intervention for up to 30 minutes in the heart of Tokyo; accelerate the development of “Hummingbird,” an in-car “edge” semiconductor to run “Heron”; and hire more management members and talented engineers in AI, semiconductor, and vehicle development to reinforce the activities.

Global Brain has decided to additionally invest into Turing because of its unpre cedented performance of its technology and the team striving to achieve full autonomous driving as well as its track record toward its vision “Make Japan’s automotive industry stronger with AI.” Through this investment, Global Brain will support Turing in realizing a new mobility experience that contributes to revolutionize the mobility industry.