Cruise, GM’s self-driving car unit, brings on Zippy team

Cruise recently brought on seven team members from Zippy.ai, which develops robots for last-mile grocery and package delivery, for an undisclosed amount of money.

The deal did not include any of Zippy’s product or intellectual property. Instead, it seems Cruise was more interested in the skillsets of the co-founders, Gabe Sibley, Alex Flint and Chris Broaddus, and their team.

“Their expertise in machine learning, computer vision, and simulation is among the best in the industry,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt wrote in a Medium post. “But perhaps more importantly, their commitment to working on a team — and doing things the right way — strengthens our ability to safely test, validate, and deploy our self-driving technology at scale.”

This announcement comes after Cruise last month parted ways with its CTO, A.G. Gangadhar, who formerly worked at Uber. Though, Zippy’s team joined Cruise back in February.