Anthony Levandowski

Born on 15th March 1980, Anthony Levandowski was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California in 1998 where he pursued his aspiration for engineering as he earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

As an enthusiastic freshman in college, he had started providing his own internet service from his basement. For the DARPA grand challenge in 2004, he, along with his fellow college mates, built an autonomous two-wheeler, nicknamed as Ghostrider, which was the only two-wheeled device in the entire competition that year and the year after that.

As an example of brilliant engineering, the motorcycle is now kept in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

After graduating from college, Anthony Levandowski joined Sebastian Thrun, a friend from the 2005 DARPA grand challenge, at Google to work on the Google Street View in 2007.

He founded 510 systems while still working at google, which is a mobile mapping start-up that experimented with Lidar technology. And just a year later, in 2008, he invented his own self-driving Privus called the “Pribot” after founding Anthony’s Robots.

In February 2017, Waymo, an autonomous vehicle research subsidiary for Alphabet Inc., filed a lawsuit against Levandowski accusing him of stealing “9.7GB of waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blue prints, design files, and testing documentation”.

In May 2017, Judge Alsup forbid Levandowski to work on Otto’s Lidar and required Uber to disclose its discussions on the technology. Later, he was fired from Uber failing to cooperate in an internal investigation.

The Pribot was a self-driving Toyota Prius with a spinning Lidar laser ranging unit making it capable and safe enough to self-drive on public roads as well. In the January of 2016, Levandowski co-founded Otto, a company that makes self-driving kits to retrofit big rig trucks, with Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette after leaving Google.

Waymo has accused Uber of “cheating” to get to the top. After the lawsuit filed by Waymo against former Waymo executive Anthony Levandowski for downloading more than 14000 confidential files from Waymo, the case has birthed quite a problematic situation for Uber.

Since Levandowski, right after leaving Waymo, co-founded Otto, now owned by Uber, Waymo suspect that Uber have used the secrets stolen by Levandowski from Waymo to progress forward. But Uber has denied these claims.