Opening Class | TechLab at Mcity Panel with Jay Ellis (MTRAC, Josh Hartung (PolySync) and Sravan Puttagunta (Civil Maps)

Jay Ellis is director of the MTRAC Transportation program, a mid-stage funding and mentorship initiative supported by the U-M Center for Entrepreneurship and the Office of Technology Transfer. MTRAC Transportation assists in the translation of novel, commercially viable technologies out of the lab and into the market. Jay facilitates the selection process, manages a board of expert industry and investment mentors, and supports projects and teams to reach important commercialization milestones.

Josh Hartung is the CEO and cofounder of PolySync, a company that is building the operating system for autonomous cars. PolySync grew out of work at AutonomouStuff, where as CTO Josh developed an engineering services group that contracted for some of the world’s most accomplished automated driving teams, including OEMs and suppliers in automotive, agriculture, mining, military, and UAVs. Prior to robotics, Josh developed consumer products as Head of Hardware for panoramic imaging startup and early Kickstarter darling Kogeto. Josh is a mechanical engineer by training and graduate of the University of Idaho.

Sravan Puttagunta is the co-founder and CEO of Civil Maps, a computer vision robotics company that crowdsources 3D semantic maps and allows mobile robotics platforms to make decisions. In his previous work, he invented video fingerprinting for linear broadcast TV to track viewing habits and contributed to software that runs in more than 30 million TVs. He has written substantial portions of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on cars that map the world in 3D.

Civil Maps has mapped the San Francisco Bay Area in 3D using AI and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithms. In the context of dramatic growth in mobile robotics platforms, Civil Maps’s products solve complex problems and navigate versatile scenarios to provide tremendous competitive advantage for clients who operate autonomous cars.

As Civil Maps’s CEO, Sravan’s current focus is on steering the company through an ecosystem of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), mapping and localization and car manufacturers. He is also growing and nurturing a rock star team and helping to form successful and supportive company culture.