Phantom Auto's remote-driving bet: $95M raised, teleops pioneer shuts down in 2024

Phantom Auto was a bet that autonomy would need humans in the loop for a long time. Founded in 2017 by Shai Magzimof and Elliot Katz, the startup built a teleoperation platform that let a remote operator — sometimes thousands of miles away — drive a vehicle, and at CES 2018 it demonstrated what it called the first remote-controlled car on public roads, a Lincoln MKZ driven from 500 miles away.

The company's original market was robotaxis and self-driving trucks, but its executives concluded public-road autonomy was decades away and pivoted in 2019 to low-speed, confined environments: forklifts, yard trucks and sidewalk delivery robots. Forklifts became the hottest application from 2020, and Phantom signed 17 commercial agreements, including Maersk, CJ Logistics, ArcBest, ConGlobal and Serve Robotics.

Phantom raised $95M in total, including a $25M round from InfraBridge in 2023 at a $500M pre-money valuation, and employed about 120 people at its peak. But it was still reliant on external funding to keep operations going and to scale; a source told TechCrunch the company had come close to another round that fell through unexpectedly.

Phantom Auto shut down in March 2024, laying off the roughly 100 employees it had left. Magzimof announced the closure on LinkedIn, citing market conditions and insufficient funding after seven years of work — one more casualty of the mobility downturn that followed the autonomous-vehicle boom.