We're building the foundational platform for autonomous vehicles that move and handle heavy loads: across logistics, construction, mining, defense, and beyond. Not a retrofit, a purpose-built solution. A purpose-built vehicle base, designed from the ground up to operate without a driver.
The autonomous heavy-duty revolution is coming. We want to provide the building block that makes it possible. One base module, every task!
Trucks move 70% of inland freight in Europe. The industry runs on drivers and it's running out of them. The shortage is severe, structural, and getting worse. Long-haul trucking struggles to attract new talent, turnover is critically high, and the gap between available trucks and available drivers is widening every year.
But the problem goes deeper than shortage. Human drivers have physical limits: rest, sleep, breaks. This caps uptime, efficiency, and what trucking can actually achieve. Additionally roughly 90% of truck accidents involve human error.
Autonomous vehicles aren't just a tech upgrade for this industry. They're the necessary answer.
There's a second, less visible problem: today's autonomous heavy-duty vehicles are retrofits, inheriting driver-centric architecture designed around a human who's no longer there. This retrofit tax means unnecessary cost and design constraints that cap what the vehicle can become. Purpose-built for autonomy removes it entirely.
We're not starting on public highways. We're starting where autonomy makes the most immediate sense: private logistics environments and specialized applications, where regulation is lower, ROI is clear, and operators are ready to move.
From there, we scale.
Our platform is purpose-built and modular: designed from day one for autonomous operation, not adapted from a human-driven vehicle. This unlocks what autonomy actually enables: continuous operation, optimized energy profiles, and rapid customization for specific use cases.
We're working with real hardware in an early prototype phase. The full vision is bigger and we'll walk you through it in our first conversation.
Phil spent two years at ETAS (Bosch) developing vehicle electronics and automotive analysis systems. In Formula Student, he was responsible for building the low voltage accumulator with a custom battery management board, from cell selection and PCB layout to C firmware and endurance validation.
In this project, he's now designing the full electrical architecture of the ATLARIS platform under Prof. Althoff. Happiest when there's a microcontroller to program, a board to debug, or a bike ride to squeeze in.
Jens spent two years building the software ecosystem for intelligent CNC machines. In Formula Student, he led the design and development of a camera perception system, from hardware assembly to image processing pipelines in ROS and CNN training.
In this project, he's now developing the full autonomous software stack for ATLARIS under Prof. Althoff. Happiest when software actually moves some hardware.
We met in 2019 during our Bachelor's degrees at DHBW Stuttgart. The spark came in Formula Student 2022/23, building real systems under real engineering pressure. After graduating, we each went into industry for two years before reconnecting for our Master's degrees at TUM in 2024.