Autonomous vehicle company Zoox ousts CEO Tim Kentley-Klay

Tim
Kentley-Klay, cofounder of Zoox, was ousted from his role as CEO
of the self-driving car company.
Zoox

• Tim Kentley-Klay has been ousted as CEO of high-profile
  self-driving car startup Zoox.
• Kentley-Klay was voted out by Zoox’s board, Bloomberg
  reported.
• He had no prior experience in cars or artificial
  intelligence before founding Zoox in 2014 with Jesse
  Levinson.

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The CEO of Zoox has left in a management shake-up at the the
high-profile, well-funded, and idiosyncratic self-driving car
startup.

Zoox has already started searching for a replacement for Tim
Kentley-Klay, who cofounded the Silicon Valley-based company, a
source close to Zoox told Business Insider. In the meantime, it
has named board member Carl Bass as its executive chairman and
cofounder Jesse Levinson as its president, the source said. Bass
is the former CEO of Autodesk.

Bloomberg and the Information previously reported
Kentley-Klay’s departure. He was voted out by the company’s
board, Bloomberg reported, citing its own unnamed source. Neither
Bloomberg’s source nor Business Insider’s offered an explanation
for the move.

Zoox has raised some $790 million in funding to develop an
autonomous vehicle. Most recently, it took in $500 million of
funding at a valuation of $3.2 billion. 

In contrast to other companies in the nascent industry, Zoox is
working on multiple aspects of self-driving cars, from the
software, to the vehicles themselves, to building its own
autonomous taxi service. Meanwhile, unlike other companies in the
space, Zoox is building cars that are designed to be
bidirectional — either end of its cars can serve as the front or
the rear.

A native of Australia, Kentley-Klay had no background automobile
engineering or artificial intelligence before starting Zoox,
according to
a recent Bloomberg profile. Instead, he had worked in online
advertising.

He became interested in self-driving cars in 2012 after reading a
blog post about Google’s autonomous vehicle effort, according to
the Bloomberg profile. He eventually moved to the US and
befriended Anthony Levandowski, then one of the lead engineers on
Google’s self-driving car project and later the notorious Uber
engineer who
allegedly stole secrets from Google and passed them on to the
app-based taxi company. Levandowski introduced him to Levinson,
who at the time was a graduate student at Stanford researching
autonomous car technology.

Levinson and Kentley-Klay founded Zoox in 2014.