Cyngn Inc

Company Overview

Cyngn Inc. is an autonomous vehicle (“AV”) technology company that is focused on addressing industrial uses for autonomous vehicles. We believe that technological innovation is needed to enable adoption of autonomous industrial vehicles that will address the substantial industry challenges that exist today. These challenges include labor shortages, high labor costs and work safety.

We integrate our full-stack autonomous driving software, DriveMod, onto vehicles manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (“OEM”) either via retrofit of existing vehicles or by integration directly into vehicle assembly. We design the Enterprise Autonomy Suite (“EAS”) to be compatible with sensors and components from leading hardware technology providers and integrate our proprietary AV software to produce differentiated autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous driving has common technological building blocks that remain similar across vehicles and applications. By tapping into these building blocks, DriveMod is designed to deliver autonomy to new vehicles via streamlined hardware/software integration. This vehicle-agnostic approach enables DriveMod to expand to new vehicles and novel operational design domains (“ODD”). In short, nearly every industrial vehicle, regardless of use case, can move autonomously using our technology.

Our approach accomplishes several primary value propositions:

We believe our market positioning as a technology partner to vehicle manufacturers creates a synergy with incumbent suppliers that already have established sales, distribution, and service/maintenance channels. By focusing on industrial use cases and partnering with the incumbent OEMs in these markets, we believe we can source and execute revenue-generating opportunities more quickly.

Our long-term vision is for EAS to become a universal autonomous driving solution with minimal marginal cost for companies to adopt new vehicles and expand their autonomous fleets across new deployments. We have already deployed DriveMod software on more than ten different vehicle form factors that range from stockchasers and stand-on floor scrubbers to 14-seat shuttles and electric forklifts as part of prototypes and proof of concept projects, demonstrating the extensibility of our AV building blocks.

Our recent progress contributes to the validation of EAS with OEM partners and end customers. We also continue to build upon our ability to scale our products and generate novel technological developments. The DriveMod Stockchaser became commercially available in early 2023 starting with the deployment from our partner-customer US Continental, a California-based leading manufacturer of quality leather and fabric care products. We also launched the DriveMod Forklift and the DriveMod Tugger as we expand our vehicle-type portfolio fleet through our OEM partnership with BYD and Motrec, respectively.

We secured paid projects with leading global customers like Arauco, along with additional projects from big brands in the Global 500 and the Fortune 100. Our patent portfolio expanded with 16 new U.S. patent grants in 2023, bringing the total grants to 19.

Figure 0: Summary of recent Cyngn technical and commercial milestones

Overview: Automation and Autonomy in Industry 5.0

The fifth industrial revolution is upon us with self-driving industrial vehicles operating alongside with human workers and encompasses the benefits from the fourth industrial revolution of smart factories and automated supply chain logistics, with big data connectivity. According to Research Nester, they forecast the global industry 5.0 market to experience remarkable CAGR growth from 2022 - 2030 led by industrial internet of things, artificial intelligence with the alliance of humans and collaborative robots.

As automation proliferates, these industries will gradually shift to service-based models that will decrease upfront capital expenditures and create new revenue streams while unlocking new value in the supply chain. Our AV technology is uniquely positioned to capitalize upon these changes by offering a universal autonomy solution that can deliver self-driving capabilities and data insights to nearly every industrial vehicle on the market.

Automation has long played a role in industrial sectors. The larger industrial automation market has grown significantly by riding the wave of new technology and innovation experienced during Industry 4.0. This consists of a wide range of technology solutions that provide varying levels of automation for critical software control systems and industrial equipment. These components are essential to the operations and growth of global markets such as manufacturing, distribution, transportation, construction, and mining. However, Industry 4.0 has its limitations in industrial autonomy. With the convergence of AI/ML, robotics, connectivity, mapping and interoperability, autonomous vehicle technology is the next leap-frog advancement in materials handling and supply chain logistics efficiency and safety propelling manufacturing into the Industry 5.0 phase.

Figure 1: Illustration of the progression from Industry 1.0 to Industry 5.0.

Automation Solutions for Industrial Equipment

The Industrial Equipment market covers a broad range of use cases and product categories, with automation solutions targeting Material Transport Equipment (“MTE”) heavily utilized by the majority of industry market sectors. For our purposes, we can think of MTE to include all material handling equipment directly related to material transit (this includes conveying equipment, monorail, hoists, storage & retrieval, and industrial vehicles). According to a Grand View Research report, the material handling equipment market was valued at $213.4 billion in 2021. They expect the CAGR from 2022 to 2030 of 5.7% to be driven by increased worker safety awareness, rising requirements for managing bulk materials and further adoption of Industry 4.0 initiatives with the use of IoT. Further with the rising need for reducing downtime and focus on improving supply chain efficiency, self-driving industrial vehicles play an important role to achieve these objectives as manufacturing transitions to Industry 5.0. Our belief is that these strong growth indicators will drive increased need for more advanced technology that will address gaps in the current capabilities of automated MTE solutions.

Historically, MTE automation has been heavily weighted in solutions related to storage/retrieval systems and conveyors because more rigid and repetitive environments are better suited for the limited capability of existing automation solutions. By contrast, industrial vehicles in the MTE category are largely still driven manually. A March 2023 report released by MHI and Deloitte finds that 74% of supply chain leaders are increasing their supply chain technology and innovation investments with 90% saying they are planning to spend more than $1 million, an 24% increase from 2022 levels. Thirty-six percent plan to spend more than $10 million, up 19% from the prior year. This investment includes solutions for improved supply chain transparency and sustainability, according to the 2023 MHI Annual Industry Report, “The Responsible Supply Chain: Transparency, Sustainability, and the Case for Business.”

The World Industrial Truck Shipment statistics reported that 1.42 million industrial EV vehicles were shipped in 2022 worldwide. However, fewer than 1% of material handling vehicles shipped every year are automated, presenting a significant opportunity to automate industrial vehicles. The cost to operate a non-autonomous material transport vehicle is reported to have an annual salary of $47,244 for warehouse drivers in the U.S. based on Indeed.com, a career and jobsite provider. Although the wages are lower in Europe, Asia and rest of the world, there are more industrial vehicles outside the Americas, or about 83% of vehicle units, thereby an even greater total available market internationally than domestically. The global installed base of industrial EV vehicles with a 3-year life span or less is about 3.75 million vehicles. With a fully loaded, global weighted average annual labor cost of $47,674 with an assumed, on average, 1.5 work shift operations, our current market potential opportunity exceeds $268 billion.

Automating industrial vehicles will address the following challenges:

Labor shortages — The hiring and retention of qualified workers is a critical concern for the markets that material transport vehicles operate within. In fact, Deloitte’s 2020 and 2022 Material Handling Industry Report showed that over 50% of the 1,000 supply chain and manufacturing leaders surveyed rated hiring and employee retention as their biggest challenge (source: MHI Deloitte Industry Report).

*Difficulty in scaling —*The traditional approaches to vehicle automation make scaling vehicle automation solutions difficult due to strains caused by service lifecycle management and issues with dynamic deployability. Industrial automation customers are forced to coordinate operational components from a variety of different vendors and lack a unifying architecture that allows the technology to scale effectively within and across sites. Significant costs are also associated with expanding the scope of existing automation solutions as they are tightly coupled to specific vehicles and often require an overhaul of the site infrastructure to overcome shortcomings in the automation technology. This can be especially true in niche environments like mines, where the deployability challenges are compounded by unique sites that require heterogeneous fleets. Furthermore, customer service, workforce training, and repair fall under service lifecycle management and must be taken into account along with the technology in order to scale efficiently, according to the “Trends in Supporting and Scaling Modern Automation” report by Ricoh & ABI Research Report.

Lagging technological advancement— Manufacturers of material transport vehicles have core competencies in mechanical, electrical, and control systems while the end users of the vehicles typically specialize in logistics, manufacturing, and material moving. There is limited expertise throughout the material handling value chain in software algorithms, sensing, and high-performance computing. Considering the incumbents’ gaps in leading-edge AV and AI technologies and the pressure existing suppliers face to ship manually-operated vehicles that address the multi-billion dollar demand that already exists, we believe it is unlikely that existing stakeholders will be able to invest in the technological advancements that will solve the industry’s fundamental challenges.

High barriers to adoption— Many solutions for automated material transport require an all-or-nothing commitment from customers: either make a major upfront investment to overhaul operations for automation or postpone automation at the risk of falling behind competition. This all-or-nothing approach to unlocking future return on investment (“ROI”) can be problematic for risk-averse companies that seek to adopt automation solutions. Depending on fleet size, traditional automation solutions such as “robot-in-a-box” may command ROI horizons of up to 4 years. Factoring in ancillary costs like installation, maintenance, on-site testing, integration, and deployment, can also represent a significant annual cost burden, according to findings by Ricoh & ABI Research Report.

To combat these challenges, we have built an Enterprise Autonomy Suite for industrial vehicles that leverages advanced in-vehicle autonomous driving technology and incorporates leading supporting technologies like data analytics, fleet management, cloud, and connectivity. EAS provides a differentiated solution that we believe will drive pervasive adoption of industrial autonomy and create value for customers at every stage of their automation growth.

Business Model: The Enterprise Autonomy Suite for Industrial Vehicles

A number of business models have been developed to support industrial autonomy where software is the enabling technology that’s transforming supply chain logistics under Industry 4.0 and 5.0. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the initial working business model for the company but this is not entirely accurate as vehicle hardware plays an integrated role in automating materials handling. Autonomy requires both the movement of “bits” (or software) and the movement of “atoms” (or hardware). Robots as a Service (RaaS) is a useful business model given the high cost of AGVs and AMRs where industrial warehouse managers may prefer to rent robots and pay a monthly subscription fee for both software and hardware usage. In our served markets where customers primarily purchase and own their industrial vehicle fleet, we deliver the software that enables self-driving vehicle capability. As such, our EAS software is designed to provide level 4 high automation, fully autonomous driving without the need for a human in the vehicle. Cyngn’s business model is thereby more attuned to Driver as a Service (DaaS) as our EAS software integrated with the vehicle hardware enables the customer to remove the human driver into self-driving functionality.

Our unique value proposition stems from the concept that the growth of industrial autonomy requires an approach that deploys applied AV solutions within a system of supportive resources rather than a technology feature that is tuned to a specific industrial vehicle.

Some companies manufacture standard industrial vehicles then integrate industrial automation software for rigid tasks. Others develop new vehicle platforms to enable more advanced automation capabilities, limiting the AV technology to a narrow use case. We developed advanced autonomous vehicle software, DriveMod, for industrial vehicles. DriveMod is a component of EAS that is operationally expansive, vehicle agnostic, and compatible with indoor and outdoor environments. EAS centers around DriveMod’s on-vehicle AV software and is supported by our Cyngn Insight and Cyngn Evolve technology and tools.

Figure 2: The core components that make up our EAS product offering.

Our approach drives value at every stage of a company’s autonomy journey

EAS provides extensible industrial autonomy solutions that can include data-driven actionable insights, partial autonomy to augment existing workflows and support human drivers, and fully autonomous vehicle mobility. By offering flexible data and autonomous services through subscription-based business models, we assuage the industry’s existing challenge of all-or-nothing adoption for autonomous vehicles. Installing DriveMod onto any vehicle unlocks a collection of valuable product offerings that customers can activate over the air, creating lower barriers to entry and enabling customers to benefit from novel data insights while adopting industrial AVs at their own pace. Our solutions also do not require infrastructure investments to enable autonomous vehicle operation.

EAS galvanizes the relationship between AVs and data

Our EAS combines core autonomous vehicle technology with a suite of tools and products that strengthen the ties between industrial business operations and the positive network effects that underpin the relationship between data and AVs. DriveMod uses data from advanced sensors to navigate AVs, creating a de facto mechanism for rich data collection. Vehicles equipped with DriveMod provide the means for us to collect data then organize, analyze, and expose customers to novel insights. This makes the data collected during vehicle operation a new type of asset that adopters of AV technology can take advantage of. Data can be stored in cloud or on-premise servers, according to customer requirements. We intend to have our customers own the data collected at their facilities and for Cyngn to have the rights to use that data for certain purposes, such as testing simulation and development. These data assets present a new opportunity to reveal previously unknown insights about day-to-day operational processes that impact safety, efficiency, vehicle maintenance, and growth.

Figure 3: The EAS product flywheel

As the deployment of industrial vehicles with DriveMod scales up, the amount and diversity of data flowing through Cyngn Insight expands, creating an accelerated feedback loop and powers our ability to use Cyngn Evolve to further enhance DriveMod, and update the on-vehicle software over-the-air, resulting in an ever-improving EAS offering.

Continual Improvement Drives Technology Advancement

DriveMod’s building blocks enable a more consistent cadence of upgrades, improvements, and customer-specific feature development that can be deployed via over-the-air updates. These capabilities ensure that the deployed system stays in sync with the changing application demands while allowing customers to focus on monetary and operational ROI. Our EAS plugs into business operations by creating and collecting real-time data and aggregating it into configurable analytics dashboards that inform customer operations as well as future DriveMod releases, creating a data set specific to each customer from high-resolution data collected during their operations.

Our Approach Augments and Upskills Workforces

Industrial vehicle autonomy represents an opportunity to minimize the adverse impact that labor shortages, employee health, and safety have on a company’s core operations. Autonomous vehicles can be relied upon to fill the voids that commonly create human resource issues like executing repetitive tasks, working during undesirable hours, and operating in uncomfortable or hazardous environments.

Furthermore, existing employees can be exposed to cutting-edge technology and develop new valuable career development opportunities. For instance, a manufacturing community in Wisconsin successfully retrained their employees to be skilled in AMR maintenance after AMRs were introduced to replace traditional conveyors, according to the article “Are Autonomous Mobile Robots at the Tipping Point” by AutomationWorld.

We Designed for Scale

EAS provides a powerful solution to scalability issues, especially for dynamic deployability and service lifecycle management. DriveMod’s vehicle-agnostic capability to deploy AV technology on diverse vehicle fleets has been proven through its deployment on more than ten different vehicle form factors that we have operated autonomously. DriveMod has been commercially released for the Columbia Stockchaser. Other autonomous vehicles were deployed as prototypes or as a part of proof-of-concept project. More than five past deployments have been at customer or beta customer sites. Other past deployments were part of our normal R&D activities and product validation that was performed with beta customers.

Our AV development and testing have included road vehicles that navigate complex dynamic environments. DriveMod is capable of perceiving more than 100 dynamic objects per second and then using that perception information to navigate autonomously. This capability has been proven via road testing in difficult driving settings like urban streets. In contrast, the industrial settings of our target market rarely encounter 100 dynamic actors per minute, let alone per second. Scalability is further strengthened by EAS creating common interfaces and experiences that unify customer data and AV operations within and across sites. Thus, proliferating our solutions with customers will be achieved by iteratively adding onto an existing EAS, which minimizes the marginal cost associated with expanding AV operations. Additionally, the deployment of EAS allows for* *all of the on-going administration, services, and vendors associated with managing the lifecycle of the system to be integrated.

**Figure 4: Illustration of DriveMod’s ability to utilize key subsystems across multiple environments and vehicle platforms

(left: off-road utility vehicle; right: indoor material handling vehicle).

Our Products

EAS is a suite of technology and tools that consists of three complementary categories: DriveMod, Cyngn Insight, and Cyngn Evolve.

DriveMod: Industrial Autonomous Vehicle System

We built DriveMod as a modular software product that is compatible with various sensor and computer hardware components that are widely used throughout the autonomous vehicle industry. Our software combined with sensors and components from industry leading technology providers covers the end-to-end requirements that enable vehicles to operate autonomously with leading-edge technology. The modularity of DriveMod allows our AV technology to be compatible across vehicle platforms as well as indoor and outdoor environments. DriveMod can be retrofitted to existing vehicle assets or integrated into a manufacturing partner’s vehicles at assembly, providing accessible options for our customers to integrate leading-edge technology whether their AV adoption strategies are evolutionary or revolutionary.

The core vehicle-agnostic DriveMod software stack is targeted and deployed to different vehicles throughDriveMod Kits, which are the AV hardware systems that take into account the specific needs of operating the DriveMod software on a specific target vehicle. Then, after prototyping and productization, DriveMod kits streamline the integration AV hardware and software integration onto vehicles at scale. The DriveMod Kit for Columbia Stockchasers is commercially released and available at scale. Subsequently, we expect to create different instances of DriveMod Kits to support the commercial release of new vehicles on the EAS platform, such as the electric forklifts and other industrial vehicles.

Figure 5: Overview of Cyngn’s autonomous vehicle technology (DriveMod)

DriveMod’s flexibility combines with our network of manufacturing and service partners to support customers at different stages of autonomous technology integration. This allows customers to grow the complexity and scope of their industrial autonomy deployments as their business transforms while continually capturing returns throughout their transition to full autonomy. EAS will also grant customers access to over-the-air software upgrades, ad hoc customer support, and flexible consumption based on usage and scale of operations. By lessening both the commercial and technical burdens of traditional vehicle automation and industrial robotics investments, industrial AVs can become universally available to the market, even reaching small and medium-sized businesses that may otherwise struggle to adopt Industry 4.0 and 5.0 technology.

Cyngn Insight: Intelligent Control Center

Cyngn Insight is the customer-facing tool suite for managing AV fleets and aggregating data to extract business insights. Analytics dashboards surface data about the system’s status, vehicle telemetry, and performance metrics. Cyngn Insight also provides tools to switch between autonomous, manual, and remote operation when required. This flexibility allows customers to use the autonomous capabilities of the system in a way that is tailored to their own operational environment. Customers can choose when to operate their DriveMod-powered vehicles autonomously and when to have human operators operate the vehicles manually or remotely based on their own business needs. When combined, these capabilities and tools make up the Cyngn Insight intelligent control center that enables flexible fleet management from any location.

Cyngn Insight’s tool suite includes configurable cloud dashboards that aggregate diverse data streams at several levels of granularity (i.e., site, fleet, vehicle, module, and component). We can collect data during “open loop” vehicle operation, meaning that the vehicles can be operated manually while still collecting the rich data enabled by the advanced on-vehicle sensors and computers. Data can be used for predictive maintenance, operational improvements, educating employees on digital transformation and more.

Cyngn Evolve: Data Optimization Tools

Cyngn Evolve is our internal tool suite that underpins the relationship between AVs and data. Through a unifying cloud-based data infrastructure, our proprietary data tools strengthen the positive network effects derived from the valuable new data created by AVs. Cyngn Evolve and its data pipelines facilitate AI/ML training and deployment, manage data sets, and support driving simulation and grading to test and validate new DriveMod releases, using both real-world and simulated data.

Figure 6: The Cyngn “AnyDrive” simulation is part of the Cyngn Evolve toolchain. The simulation environment creates a digital version of the physical world. This allows for customer data sets to be leveraged and augmented to achieve testing and validation prior to releasing new AV features.

As AV technology expertise matures globally, there may be opportunities to monetize the sophisticated AV-centric tools of Cyngn Evolve. Currently, we believe that AV development is confined to small groups of experts. Therefore, Cyngn Evolve is currently an internal EAS tool that we use to advance DriveMod and Cyngn Insight, our customer-facing EAS products.

Corporate Strategy

360° Sales and Marketing

We are building a go-to-market ecosystem that we believe to be highly leveraged by using our partners as the foundation of our growth strategy. We plan to utilize these relationships to generate and cultivate customer demand, acquire new customers, and deliver additional services to our customers.

Key elements of our market entry and expansion roadmap include:

Focus: manufacturing and distribution material handling vehicles

Manufacturing and distribution applications require the shortest timeline for deployment due to the common use of material handling vehicles in these environments and the commercial availability of our DriveMod Stockchaser solution. We have already deployed DriveMod-powered industrial vehicles at multiple manufacturing and distribution facilities. These vehicles were previously deployed as prototypes or as a part of a proof-of-concept project. Of these past deployments, one was paid. Future deployments will primarily be commercial deployments with limited prototype or proof-of-concept deployments that may be engaged opportunistically for strategic value.

Broaden: address other industrial vehicle use cases

The industries that utilize material transport vehicles share trends, challenges, and opportunities. DriveMod has been architected to be vehicle agnostic and allow for efficient expansion to industries such as mining, construction, yard operations, and agriculture.

Expand: develop autonomous vehicle technologies across other sectors

According to a CB Insights report, “33 Industries Other Than Auto That Driverless Cars Could Turn Upside Down,” autonomous vehicle technology brings value to at least 33 industries. Because our core autonomous technology is universal, the Company has an opportunity to generate revenue across a variety of industries. We believe that developing the sales and marketing infrastructure to access these markets is an essential aspect of driving growth in these areas.

Revenue Sources

We anticipate that our technology will generate revenue through three main methods: deployment, EAS subscriptions, and DriveMod customization.

Deployment

Deploying our EAS requires us and our integration partners to work with a new client to map the job site, gather data, and install our AV technology within their fleet and site. New deployments yield project-based revenues that are assessed based on the scope of the deployment. Our major collaborators in this area are our OEM partners, and we can reinforce our deployment capability with integration and services from third party partners. Working directly with our OEM partners as well as with third party experts ensures that we can deploy our technology globally and at-scale.

EAS Subscription

According to ABI Research, the cloud robotics opportunity is expected to grow from $3.3 billion in 2019 to $157.8 billion by 2030, accounting for 30% of the robotic industry’s total worth (source: Cloud Robotics Market Predicted to Grow to $157.8 billion by 2030, article by Robotics & Automation News). Sustained revenue growth is expected to come largely from recurring subscription revenues that enable companies to tap into an ever-expanding suite of AV and AI capabilities as organizations transition into full industrial autonomy.

Industrial operations are extremely rich with data. However, we believe this data is still being put to limited use, especially as it pertains to equipment transport and autonomy performance. EAS creates a foundation for extracting new and valuable enterprise data insights by the nature of the advanced sensors, electronic control units, and connectivity that supports DriveMod’s functionality. We can monetize the data insights in a variety of ways by offering configurable cloud dashboards for fleet/asset management, operational performance data, and predictive analytics to customers. In parallel, exposing this fleet and vehicle data could be a boon for our OEM partners as they evolve to optimize their product roadmaps and better integrate our technology to serve the future needs of industrial autonomy.

DriveMod Customization and Non-Recurring Engineering (“NRE”)

DriveMod’s capability as an AV software stack will continue to expand in several dimensions—most notably, in the number of vehicles that DriveMod can operate autonomously and the maneuvers that a DriveMod-powered vehicle can execute. Targeting DriveMod to operate new vehicle types autonomously as well as the expansion of autonomous maneuvers that can be executed by DriveMod are both customizations that may generate revenues from OEMs or end customers through NRE contracts. New customizations yield project-based revenues that are assessed based on the scope of the deployment. This revenue stream is substantiated by the commercial contract that was entered into with an end customer for deploying DriveMod on electric forklifts.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Our go-to-market strategy hinges on strategic collaboration and is based on a set of three basic principles:

Collaborate — industrial vehicle OEMs

Our focus is on acquiring new customers who are either (a) looking to embed our technology into their vehicle products or (b) upsell their existing clients with our vehicle retrofits. We follow a named account coverage approach. After establishing a customer relationship with an OEM, we seek to embed our technology into their product roadmap and expand our services to their many clients. We believe this category represents a substantial opportunity to generate revenue as a single relationship with an OEM that can lead to revenue opportunities across the entire marketplace. For example, our partner, Columbia Vehicle Group with whom we have partnered through a non-binding memorandum of understanding, provides over 70 years of vehicle manufacturing experience and customer insight.

Land & expand — end customers

Our go-to-market strategy is to acquire new customers that use industrial vehicles in their mission-critical operations. We pursue this strategy by being hyper-focused on building a robust pipeline of prospective customers (“land”) and utilizing strategic sales channels that will result in coordinated opportunities to accelerate growth (“expand”). Our archetypal customers are corporations that deploy fleets of heterogeneous industrial vehicles across many sites. DriveMod’s flexibility is intertwined with the wide-ranging applicability of our EAS and creates the unique leveraged opportunity of expanding across vehicles and sites with these major customers. After an initial win for a first AV deployment with a customer, we can expand within the site to additional vehicle platforms, then expand the use of similar vehicles to other sites operated by the customer and finally repeat across new vehicles and sites.

Partner instead of compete — technology

The scaling of Industrial Autonomy will benefit from an ecosystem made up of different enabling technologies and services, such as hardware manufacturing, connectivity, Internet of Things (“IoT”), and digital integration. Rather than trying to compete with other technology suppliers, we intend to rely on our strategic collaborations that give both partners access to new markets and capabilities. For example, partners like Symboticware and Airbiquity respectively provide complementary solutions in technologies like cyber security, digital asset management, and connectivity. These collaborative partnerships are established through mutually beneficial, non-binding memorandums of understanding or partnering agreements for the purpose of joint go-to-market efforts. Thereby we leverage our limited R&D resources with our technology partners through out-sourcing versus in-house development resulting in a more efficient asset-light approach in product development.

Our Technology

Autonomous vehicles must integrate a suite of technologies to generate operational value. Our core competencies are in DriveMod, the on-vehicle AV technology stack that is underpinned by AI and robotics expertise and paramount to enabling autonomous mobility. With Cyngn Insight, EAS integrates analytics, visual dashboards, connectivity, cloud services, and other traditional software systems that allow customers to interact with and extract insights out of our advanced AV technology.

Mapping & localization

Our proprietary system design abstracts mapping and localization data so that DriveMod can use a variety of high-accuracy solutions to create the optimal mapping and localization system for the given environment. Our mapping and localization system distills sensor data into contextually rich representations of the physical world and extracts common insights like required stops and navigation boundaries. These common insights help to create consistent AV operation across diverse sites, enabling our AVs to navigate both indoor and outdoor.

Perception

Granular, efficient perception forms the basis of advanced AVs. Perception is one of the most complex subsystems, requiring specialized data infrastructure and engineering expertise in AI/ML and high-performance computing. We have built a modular sensor fusion pipeline that runs on a low compute footprint and creates the flexibility to customize our perception stack according to application requirements. Our perception architecture streamlines DriveMod deployments on new vehicles. Our approach addresses common industry challenges like integrating different sensor modalities and accounting for different sensor mounting positions. We have now integrated DriveMod into more than ten different vehicle platforms, utilizing various combinations of Light Detecting and Ranging (“LiDAR”), camera, radar, ultrasonic, and positioning sensors.

Path planning

Our system’s ability to react and adjust to real-time changes creates a more efficient workflow than basic automation solutions that can only stop/go along a rigid path and require constant human hand-holding. The Cyngn path planning system provides thousands of trajectory candidates per second, enabling more complex paths to be navigated that may include advanced behavior like carefully nudging around obstacles or negotiating intersections.

Decision making

The Cyngn decision engine holds the logic and decision-making rules that govern driving behavior. The decision engine pulls together insights from mapping, perception, and path planning to enable more complex vehicle maneuvers and automated conflict resolution. The system is extensible to introduce new capabilities with logic that is designed to achieve a high level of abstraction, which enables us to adopt new driving behaviors.

Actuation

A subsystem of our software stack, Cyngn-by-Wire (“CbW”), addresses the basic requirements of mechanical vehicle components that must be met for DriveMod to make a vehicle operate autonomously. Legacy electronic control units (“ECU”) that do not use Drive-by-Wire (“DbW”) technology that enables software commands to electronically control vehicle actuation typically create a hurdle for integrating AV technology. CbW addresses this issue by decoupling the hardware and software components of DbW systems. For vehicles with legacy ECU’s, CbW allows customers to replace existing ECUs with DbW hardware that can be tuned to meet the needs of the selected vehicle platform using CbW software. When vehicles have DbW ECUs already installed, the CbW software layer is configured and applied without the need for replacing the hardware. Thus, CbW enables AV actuation across vehicle fleets with varying levels of vehicle age and sophistication.

Competitive Environment

There is an increasing demand for autonomous vehicle solutions in an effort to increase safety, improve efficiency, and enhance productivity to meet the goals set out by Industry 4.0 and 5.0. Autonomous vehicles are an enabling technology that gives us the opportunity to add more value to customers.

The market for automated vehicle solutions is burgeoning, and the advanced technology required to enable autonomous solutions in industrial environments is still developing. As a result, we face competition from a range of companies seeking to develop autonomous vehicle solutions. These competitors include traditional industrial vehicle manufacturers (such as Crown Equipment’s automated forklifts or Toyota Materials Handling) robotics providers (such Locus Robotics for stock picking AMRs or SeeGrid for pallet and tow AMRs), and software companies (such as Brain Corp for floor scrubbers or Oxbotica for people and goods transport), as well as large corporate competitors that provide a broad range of software, service, and logistics solutions across many markets. These competitors are also working to advance technology, reliability, and innovation in their development of new and improved solutions.

We will continue to face competition from existing competitors and new companies entering the industrial autonomy landscape. Many of our competitors either have technical or strategic barriers that limit their product offerings to specific deployment environments, operations protocols, or vehicle form factors. It is our belief that it will take a substantial period of time to develop features that satisfy the dynamic needs of industry customers. Additionally, larger corporate competitors are likely to encounter roadblocks due to competitive overlap with end customers, limiting their ability to address the needs of the broader industrial market. With specific regard to manufacturing and distribution, a number of competitors have already begun to deploy products, but we believe the benefits stemming from our modular software-centric approach, technical expertise in the area of autonomous vehicles, and the ubiquitous applicability of EAS gives us the potential to displace current offerings and capture a significant share of this rapidly growing market.

Governmental and Environmental Regulations

Regulatory considerations contribute to our current strategic position that targets enterprise customers with operations mostly confined to private property. This decreases our exposure to regulations, which mitigates some deployment risks. Typically, we will satisfy regulatory requirements by adhering to the protocols of the site operator (the end customer).

The regulatory environment for autonomous industrial vehicles is still being developed. In 2016, the United States Department of Transportation (“US DoT”) issued regulations that require the submission of documentation covering specific topics related to autonomy and government regulators, but these regulations are targeted towards road vehicles. As the autonomous industrial vehicle regulatory environment continues to develop, it will be imperative not only to comply with applicable standards but to be an active participant in the development of new standards. Outside of government standards, third party organizations, industrial workplace advocates, and industry groups have and will continue to impose self-regulatory standards. In certain cases, these standards may be contractually applicable to our systems, products, and operations. Thus, we expect and prepare to comply with various standards, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”), International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”), International Electrotechnical Commission (“IEC”), or American National Standards Institute (“ANSI”) on a case-by-case basis.

U.S. and international regulations related to data privacy are also of great importance to our company’s products, operations, and culture. Like the autonomous vehicle regulatory environment, the regulatory framework for data privacy, protection, and security worldwide is continuously evolving and developing. As a result, interpretation and implementation standards and enforcement practices are likely to remain fluid for the foreseeable future. As our company expands its operations, the collection, use, and protection of any and all data assets will be internally scrutinized to ensure compliance with this changing landscape.

Decreasing the environmental impact of industrial vehicles is a high priority. Research has shown that equipment utilization rate, configuration, and operational consistency have a strong effect on the emissions released by industrial vehicle equipment (Source: Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association). A key focus of Cyngn’s EAS will be working to minimize the environmental impact of industrial vehicles through new data insights that can contribute to more sustainable practices. Our historic vehicle platforms have primarily been electric vehicles (“EV”). While electric drivetrains are not a requirement for DriveMod’s technology, EVs are often an application requirement since the vehicles operate alongside humans in enclosed spaces.

Intellectual Property

Our ability to drive impact and growth within the autonomous industrial vehicle market largely depends on our ability to obtain, maintain, and protect our intellectual property and all other property rights related to our products and technology. To accomplish this, we utilize a combination of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets as well as employee and third-party non-disclosure agreements, licenses, and other contractual obligations. In addition to protecting our intellectual property and other assets, our success also depends on our ability to develop our technology and operate without infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating the intellectual property and property rights of third parties, customers, and partners.

Our software stack has over 30 subsystems, including those designed for perception, mapping & localization, decision making, planning, and control. As of February 29, 2024, we have 19 granted U.S. patents and submitted 6 pending U.S. patent and 20 international patent applications and expect to continue to file additional patent applications with respect to our technology in the future.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability

Our mission is to deliver the benefits of autonomous industrial vehicle technology to enhance the safety and operational efficiency of materials handling in a cost-effective method in supply chain logistics. We seek to make the movement of goods in warehouse settings safer, faster, cheaper while reducing greenhouse gas emissions through greater operating efficiencies.

Human Capital Resources

Our team is composed of energetic, motivated and highly experienced visionaries. They include machine vision, AI, and autonomous software engineers from the greatest universities in the world. Together with a highly talented and skilled support team, we solve real-world industrial applications in autonomy. As of February 29, 2024, we had 81 full-time employees. The majority of our employees are based in Silicon Valley, California.

Our core values include focus on impact, display curiosity, communicate proactively, apply good judgment, and demonstrate selflessness. We believe these values encourage innovation and a team-oriented culture. Our employees have access to a wide range of training, different career paths, and, most importantly, challenging and purposeful work. Our culture is also built on diversity, inclusion, camaraderie, and celebration. We organize regular team building activities and public recognition forums to celebrate our diversity and invest in strong relationships.

In addition to a positive culture and career development, we offer a robust benefits package. This package includes a flexible vacation policy, access to a 401(k) plan, premier health plan options and numerous voluntary benefits for employees and their dependents.

Corporate History

The Company was incorporated in the State of Delaware on February 1, 2013, under the original name Cyanogen, Inc. or Cyanogen. The Company started as a venture funded company with offices in Seattle and Palo Alto, aimed at commercializing CyanogenMod, direct to consumers and through collaborations with mobile phone manufacturers. CyanogenMod was an open-source operating system for mobile devices, based on the Android mobile platform. Cyanogen released multiple versions of its mobile operating system and collaborated with an ecosystem of companies including mobile phone OEMs, content providers and leading technology partners from 2013 to 2015.

In 2016 the Company’s management and board of directors, determined to pivot its product focus and commercial direction from the mobile device and telecom space to industrial and commercial autonomous driving with the hiring of Lior Tal in June 2016 to serve as the company’s chief operating officer. Mr. Tal, a seasoned executive of startup firms where prior to joining the company, co-founded Snaptu which later was acquired by Facebook (currently known as Meta Platforms, Inc.), as well as held various leadership roles at Actimize, DiskSites and Odigo; all of these companies which were also later acquired. Mr. Tal was promoted to chief executive officer in October 2016 and continues to serve in this role along with chairman of the board. In May 2017, the Company changed its name to Cyngn Inc.

Available Information

Our principal business address is 1015 O’Brien Dr., Menlo Park, CA 94025. We maintain our corporate website athttps://cyngn.com(this website address is not intended to functionas a hyperlink and the information contained on our website is not intended to be a part of this Annual Report). We make available free of charge on https://investors.cyngn.com/ our annual, quarterly, and current reports, and amendments to those reports if any, as soon as reasonably practical after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. We may from time to time provide important disclosures to investors by posting them in the Investor Relations section of our website.

Our common stock is quoted on the Nasdaq under the symbol “CYN”. We file annual, quarterly, and current reports, proxy statements and other information with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) and are subject to the requirements of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act). These filings are available to the public on the Internet at the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov.