Companies founded by Cruise alumni, also known as the "Cruise Mafia".
Sources: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, GitHub, official websites, etc.
If you want to contribute, please submit a PR and make sure to
- Sort company names in alphabetical order
- Cite sources of information
- Respect the company founders/owners for subjective information, such as tagline
Also, if there are too many Cruise alumni in one company (awesome!), please only include:
- Co-Founders or founding team members
- Executives (e.g., VP of Engineering, Head of Product)
- Or if the person himself/herself was a notable alumni (e.g., Director of Robotics) in Cruise's history
- Founded: 2020, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Peter Gao (Co-Founder and CEO), Quinn Johnson (Co-Founder)
- Financing history:
- 2020/8: Seed (YC S20)
- 2021/2: Seed (Sequoia, Kyle Vogt, etc.)
- Tagline: The Platform For ML Data Operations. Aquarium helps teams streamline the process of finding issues, validating fixes, and adding data for their machine learning datasets.
- Founded: 2023, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Nicholas Charriere (Founder and CEO), Ben Reinhart (Founder and CTO)
- Financing history:
- 2023/8: Seed (YC S23)
- Tagline: Axilla is a framework for the AI engineer of the future: a product-focused TypeScript developer.
- Founded: 2021, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Matt Cox (Founder and CEO), Kiana Lo (Head of Talent Acquisition), Avinash Nair (former Co-Founder)
- Financing history:
- 2021/7: Pre-Seed (Mischief et al.)
- 2021/8: Seed (Apollo Projects et al.)
- Tagline: Beacon AI is building the future of flight safety for commercial and private fleets.
- Founded: 2023, in San Francisco, CA
- Cruise alumni: Zheng Hao (Founder & CEO)
- Financing history:
- 2023: Pre-Seed
- Tagline: Cellulose helps machine learning engineers understand, fine tune, and improve the performance of their models.
- Founded: 2021, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Adrian Macneil (Co-Founder and CEO), Roman Shtylman (Co-Founder), Jacob Bandes-Storch (First Engineer)
- Financing history:
- 2022/1: Seed (Amplify Partners)
- 2022/10: Series A (Eclipse Ventures, Amplify Partners, Kyle Vogt)
- Tagline: The leading observability platform for robotics developers. Foxglove brings advanced data infrastructure and visualization to any robotics framework, supercharging your development and debugging.
- Founded: 2022, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Helen Zhou (Co-Founder)
- Financing history:
- 2022/10: Pre-Seed (South Park Commons, etc.)
- Tagline: Idea to design in an instant, powered by AI
- Founded: 2021, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Brian Calvert (Co-Founder)
- Financing history:
- 2022/5: Pre-Seed (Google Ventures, NEA, etc.)
- Tagline: Simplify your AI strategy. Graft is a modern AI platform, supporting the full production lifecycle of AI from data ingestion through deployment and monitoring. No infrastructure or ML skills required.
- Founded: 2022, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Lei Xu (Co-Founder and CTO), Jai Chopra (Head of Product)
- Financing history:
- 2022: Seed (YC W22)
- Tagline: Developer-friendly, serverless vector database for AI applications. LanceDB is an open-source database for vector-search built with persistent storage, which greatly simplifies retrevial, filtering and management of embeddings.
- Founded: 2020, in San Carlos, CA
- Cruise alumni: Jason Wilson (Co-Founder and CTO), Kevin Chu (Engineer)
- Financing history:
- 2021: Seed (Operator Partners, Founders Fund, Lux Capital)
- Tagline: Pain and uncertainty are lousy. Receiving care shouldn't be.
- Founded: 2022, in San Francisco
- Cruise alumni: Emmanuel Turlay (Founder and CEO), Joshua Bauer (Founding Engineer), Tudor Scurtu (Founding Engineer), Chance An (Founding Engineer)
- Financing history:
- 2022/11: Seed (Race Capital, YC S22, Oliver Cameron, etc.)
- Tagline: The open-source Continuous Machine Learning Platform. End-to-end Python pipelines from your laptop to your cloud cluster in minutes. Tracked, reproducible, visualized.
- Founded: 2022, in New York
- Cruise alumni: Tom Bachant (Co-Founder and CEO), Jake McCloskey (Co-Founder and CTO)
- Financing history:
- 2022: Seed (YC S22)
- Tagline: Scale up your support in Slack. Unthread is a Slack inbox that turns support requests into prioritized tickets with assignments and SLAs.
- Founded: 2018, in Hayward, CA
- Cruise alumni: Gabe Sibley (Co-Founder and CEO), Lawrence Ibarria (Co-Founder and COO)
- Financing history:
- 2019/7: Seed (E2JDJ)
- 2019/10: Series A (AgFunder, Autotech Ventures)
- 2022/11: Series A (Cleveland Avenue, AgFunder, Autotech Ventures, etc.)
- Tagline: The most advanced multi-action robotic farming implement, designed for superhuman farming.
- Founded: 2021, in Huntsville, AL
- Cruise alumni: Divya Thakur (Co-Founder)
- Financing history:
- 2022/5: Pre-Seed
- Tagline: We mow lawns with robots.
Created and maintained by James Luo, who co-founded and led the Machine Learning Platform team at Cruise from 2018 to 2021.