Autonomic

Founded in 2016, Autonomic emerged from Palo Alto, California, to develop a cloud-based platform for the connected vehicle industry. The company's trajectory significantly shifted when Ford Motor Company, with whom it was already collaborating, acquired it in January 2018. This acquisition was a strategic move by Ford to accelerate its mobility initiatives and establish the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC). Co-founders included Sunny Madra (CEO) and Amar Varma (COO), both known for founding the mobile development shop Xtreme Labs which was acquired by Pivotal in 2013. Following the acquisition, Madra took on a role to lead Ford X, a new team focused on incubating new transport business models. Another co-founder, Caleb Welton, served as SVP of Engineering. In 2023, Autonomic was fully integrated into Ford Motor Company.

Autonomic's core offering is the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC), an open, API-driven platform that standardizes how applications and services interact with connected vehicles. It is designed to manage and process vast amounts of real-time data from vehicles, including telemetry and location information, serving as a central nervous system for connected cars. This infrastructure abstracts the complexity of communicating with different vehicle models, enabling developers, automakers, public transit providers, and other service operators to build and deploy mobility applications more easily. These applications can range from remote maintenance and driver safety features to fleet management, congestion avoidance programs, and routing for autonomous vehicles. The platform aims to connect diverse elements of the urban mobility ecosystem, such as vehicles, public transit, and city infrastructure, to create more efficient transportation networks.

The business model centers on providing this unifying platform to a range of clients, including automotive OEMs, software developers, and mobility service providers like ride-sharing companies. By offering a standardized set of tools and APIs, the TMC allows partners to develop new services and revenue streams from connected vehicle data. Prior to its full integration into Ford, Autonomic operated as an independent subsidiary, with collaborations extending to companies like Fujitsu and Alibaba Cloud to broaden the platform's reach and capabilities. The technology stack includes the use of MQTT protocol for bidirectional communication between vehicles and the cloud, demonstrating its capacity to handle thousands of messages per second for millions of cars.

Keywords: connected vehicles, Transportation Mobility Cloud, automotive data, mobility services, API platform, vehicle connectivity, fleet management, urban mobility, IoT platform, Ford Motor Company