Today, German mobility startup MOTOR Ai announced a €17.1 million Seed funding round to bring its neuroscience-driven autonomous vehicle technology into full deployment, starting with German public roads.
The round was led by Segenia Capital and eCAPITAL, with participation from mobility-focused angels. The new capital will support hiring, commercial rollouts, and expansion.
“This type of AI enables the highest safety standard in autonomous driving – as is already legally standardised in Europe,” says MOTOR Ai CEO and Co-founder Roy Uhlmann.
MOTOR Ai was founded in 2017 by Roy Uhlmann (CEO) and Adam Bahlke (CTO). The company has developed Level 4 intelligence for autonomous driving. The system, which is based on cognitive intelligence, is allegedly able to make decisions in complex traffic situations.
In contrast to purely machine learning systems, which are based on (pre-) trained situations, MOTOR Ai’s system claims to make reliable and comprehensible decisions in previously untested scenarios. This results in two major advantages: the autonomous driver can be certified according to international safety standards and, due to its ability to generalise information, does not need to be trained in all scenarios.
At the heart of the system is a cognitive architecture rooted in active inference, a model from neuroscience that allows vehicles to make structured, transparent decisions.
As other providers pursue autonomy through brute-force data collection, end-to-end solutions and black-box prediction models, MOTOR Ai explains they have taken a different approach: one that is reportedly deeply explainable and certifiable on the world’s highest safety levels.
“This ‘Made in Germany’ in-house development reduces inter-dependencies while strengthening Europe’s ability to operate in critical innovative technology”, says Lucas Merle, Principal at eCAPITAL.
This year, vehicles equipped with MOTOR Ai’s Level 4 system for autonomous driving will start operations in several German districts. The vehicles are supervised on board by a safety driver to be taken out during 2026. These deployments include both, the full onboard autonomy stack and the technical supervision required by law – according to the company this gives local transit authorities a fully operable path to autonomous transport without compromising control or safety.
For the team behind MOTOR Ai, these milestones are the product of years of deep technical development including regulatory groundwork. Since 2017, the company has built its entire autonomy stack in-house from Berlin, working in close dialogue with certification authorities and federal certifiers.
“Our solution meets key requirements for transparency and traceability of autonomous driving decisions, as required by authorities,” added Roy Uhlmann. “That clearly distinguishes us from US providers and at the same time optimally complies with European regulatory requirements.”
As autonomous systems move closer to everyday use, European governments and the public are asking tougher questions: How are these systems making decisions? Can those decisions be explained or are they pure black box systems?
MOTOR Ai’s architecture has been designed with those questions in mind.
“In a regulated environment like Europe, trust and compliance are non-negotiable,” said Michael Janßen, General Partner, Segenia Capital. “MOTOR Ai has built a solution that is not only technologically differentiated, but fundamentally aligned with how Europe thinks about infrastructure and public safety. This is how autonomy will scale in future.”
Looking ahead, MOTOR Ai plans to grow its engineering, safety and type approval teams, expand deployment partnerships with municipalities, and begin cross-border regulatory expansion into other European markets.
“We don’t think the future of autonomy in Europe should be a mystery,” added Uhlmann, explaining the different approach Germany and the EU takes in comparison to other markets. “It should be measurable, inspectable, and designed to earn public trust. That’s what we’ve been building, and now we’re ready to scale it.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/07/berlin-based-motro-ai-raises-e17-1-million-to-develop-the-first-certified-autonomous-vehicle-fleet-for-europe/
