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May Mobility: Ann Arbor's $307M Bet on Driverless Microtransit

May Mobility is the Ann Arbor autonomous shuttle operator with $307M raised, driverless service in Georgia, and a Lyft robotaxi partnership.

A2Hub Editorial· Rusty Roof Media· Updated May 4, 2026

May Mobility

By A2Hub Editorial. Published 2026-04-22. Last updated: 2026-04-22.

At a glance

  • Founded: 2017
  • Founders: Edwin Olson, Alisyn Malek
  • HQ: Ann Arbor, Michigan
  • Employees: ~342 (PitchBook, 2025)
  • Funding raised: ~$307M across Series A through Series D
  • Key investors: Toyota Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Tokio Marine, Mirai Creation Fund, Grab
  • Status: Private; driverless commercial service live in Peachtree Corners GA; Lyft robotaxi partnership announced for Atlanta
  • Website: maymobility.com

The Ann Arbor company that put driverless shuttles on real streets first

May Mobility is the autonomous vehicle company that decided not to wait for Level 5. While most of the AV industry burned through capital chasing a fully general self-driving stack, the Ann Arbor team picked a deliberately narrower problem: low-speed, route-fixed microtransit shuttles in geofenced areas, with safety operators in seat early and out of seat as the operational design domain hardened. That choice is why May Mobility is running driverless commercial service in 2026 while several better-funded peers have folded.

The company has raised approximately $307M, employs around 342 people per PitchBook's 2025 snapshot, and operates from a downtown-adjacent Ann Arbor headquarters within reach of the University of Michigan campus that produced its founding team. In October 2025, Singapore-based Grab led a strategic investment to underwrite Southeast Asian expansion. Earlier in 2025, May announced a partnership with Lyft to roll out robotaxi service starting in Atlanta. The driverless commercial route in Peachtree Corners, Georgia is live. Driver-out testing runs in Sun City, Arizona and on Ann Arbor streets.

Founding story: Edwin Olson, the APRIL Lab, and the AV gap nobody was filling

May Mobility was founded in 2017 by Edwin Olson and Alisyn Malek. Olson is a University of Michigan robotics professor who runs the APRIL (Autonomy, Perception, Robotics, Interfaces, Learning) Lab at U-M. His academic work spans SLAM, multi-agent coordination, and the kind of probabilistic reasoning that has to underpin any real-world autonomy stack. Malek came in as the operational and commercial complement, a U-M alum who had run mobility programs at GM and at the Techstars Mobility accelerator in Detroit.

The founding thesis was contrarian for 2017. Most well-funded AV companies of the era (Cruise, Waymo, Argo, Aurora, Zoox) were chasing the broadest possible operational design domain: a single autonomous stack that could drive anywhere a human can. May Mobility went the other direction. The team picked low-speed shuttles, fixed or semi-fixed routes, geofenced cities, and a multi-policy decision-making architecture (MPDM) that the academic literature out of Olson's lab had been developing for years. The bet: revenue from real cities will compound while the rest of the industry is still in closed-course validation.

The first commercial deployment was in downtown Detroit in 2018, shuttling Bedrock employees along a fixed Jefferson Avenue loop. From there May expanded into Columbus, Providence, Grand Rapids, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Arlington (TX), and several other cities, each contract structured as a paid service rather than a free pilot. By 2024, the company was operating its multi-policy decision-making stack on Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS platforms in production, with cumulative passenger trip counts in the hundreds of thousands.

What they build

May Mobility runs three things in parallel: an autonomous driving stack, an operations platform, and a vehicle integration layer.

The MPDM autonomy stack. Multi-policy decision making is the headline algorithm. Instead of a monolithic neural net trying to plan the next maneuver, MPDM evaluates a portfolio of candidate policies (yield, merge, follow, lane-change, etc.) against probabilistic forecasts of what other agents on the road are likely to do, and selects the policy with the best expected outcome under uncertainty. The architecture is a direct descendant of Olson's academic work and is what the company points to as its technical moat.

Microtransit operations. The product is not a car. The product is a service: route design, passenger booking via app or kiosk, fleet operations dashboards, charging and maintenance schedules, integration with municipal transit systems where applicable. May runs the service end to end for most clients.

Vehicle platform integration. May does not build its own cars. The fleet currently runs on Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS platforms (the wheelchair-accessible commercial AV variant Toyota engineered specifically for this kind of microtransit deployment). Earlier deployments used Polaris GEM low-speed neighborhood vehicles. The Toyota partnership is strategically deep.

Funding history

May Mobility has raised approximately $307M across the published rounds:

  • Series A (2018): $11.5M led by BMW i Ventures with Toyota AI Ventures, Maven Ventures, and Tandem Capital
  • Series B (2019): $50M led by Toyota Ventures with Millennium Technology Value Partners
  • Series C (2022): $83M led by Mirai Creation Fund II (Toyota / Sumitomo Mitsui), with Bridgestone Americas, Tokio Marine, and existing investors
  • Series D (2023): $73M led by NTT, with Toyota Ventures, Mirai Creation Fund II, BMW i Ventures, and others
  • Strategic round (2025): Grab led a strategic investment to fund Southeast Asia expansion

Toyota's investment cadence across Series A, B, C, and D is the standout pattern. Toyota Motor Corporation is May Mobility's largest investor, vehicle platform partner, and strategic anchor. The Lyft partnership announced in 2025 is the demand-side counterpart: May provides the autonomy stack and operations capability, Lyft provides the consumer demand surface for robotaxi service starting in Atlanta.

Ann Arbor footprint

May Mobility is headquartered at 1100 N. Main Street in Ann Arbor, with operational space in town for vehicle work, simulation, and software engineering. Headcount per PitchBook's 2025 report is approximately 342, with the majority concentrated in Ann Arbor. The company also operates an A2GO autonomous shuttle service in partnership with the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor SPARK, launched October 11, 2021, that has run scheduled routes through Kerrytown, the State Street corridor, and Central Campus. A2GO is the rare case where the residents of an AV company's home city actually ride the company's vehicles.

The Mcity proving ground, U-M's 32-acre AV testbed on North Campus, sits inside May's testing footprint as well. Driver-out testing in Ann Arbor uses public streets in addition to closed-course Mcity time. The combination of headquarters, a real public deployment in town, and the Mcity testbed makes Ann Arbor the densest single-city AV development environment in the country at this scale.

Leadership and the Olson lineage

Edwin Olson is CEO. Alisyn Malek departed as COO in 2020 to launch a separate venture (Middle Third) and serves on AV policy and governance bodies. Operational leadership has matured around production deployment veterans hired out of automotive and ride-share companies through 2022 and 2023. The U-M robotics talent pipeline continues to feed May Mobility engineering hires; a meaningful share of the company's research and applied autonomy team holds U-M robotics degrees.

The broader Olson lineage at U-M, including the APRIL Lab and adjacent robotics research groups, is part of the reason Ann Arbor punches above its size in autonomy talent. May Mobility is the most visible commercial expression of that lineage.

Culture and hiring

May Mobility hires robotics engineers, software engineers (C++, Python, distributed systems), perception researchers, simulation engineers, vehicle operations staff, hardware and vehicle integration engineers, and customer-facing ops roles at deployment sites. The core engineering organization is in Ann Arbor, with site-ops teams distributed to live-service cities. Public Glassdoor signal is modest volume and trends positive on mission and peer quality, with the typical growth-stage AV notes around deployment-launch intensity. Work model is primarily in-office at the Ann Arbor headquarters for engineering roles, with hybrid flexibility for specific functions.

Strategic reading

May Mobility sits in a better 2026 position than most of the AV industry. Cruise's 2023 implosion in San Francisco took the air out of the broader robotaxi narrative. Waymo continues to expand inside a small number of cities but at a capital scale few can replicate. Aurora is publicly listed and pivoting toward trucking. In that field, May Mobility's pattern is distinctive: real paid commercial deployments in 12-plus cities, driverless service live in at least one, OEM and ride-share partnerships locked in, and a capital base that did not require burning $5B to get here.

The pivotal question through 2026-2028 is unit economics. Technical feasibility is largely demonstrated. What remains is proving that the per-trip economics work at scale outside subsidized municipal contracts. The Lyft Atlanta rollout and the Grab Southeast Asia partnership are the two contexts where that question will be tested most directly.

If you're considering an offer

May Mobility is one of the few places in Ann Arbor where a robotics or AV engineer can work on serious autonomy software at scale without relocating to the Bay Area or Pittsburgh. The tradeoff versus a coastal AV offer is real. You give up some compensation absolute dollars (senior comp at May is below Waymo, Aurora, Tesla autopilot levels) in exchange for Ann Arbor cost of living, a direct connection to U-M's robotics lineage, and real-world deployment feedback that pure-research jobs do not provide. Equity is private-company stock; size your option grant as a lottery ticket, not a down payment. AV is capital-intensive with long paths to profitability.

Why it matters

May Mobility is the test case for whether the geographically constrained, low-speed, microtransit thesis ever scales to a sustainable business. Cruise's 2023 implosion in San Francisco took the air out of the broader robotaxi narrative. Waymo continues to expand but inside a small handful of cities. Aurora is publicly listed and pivoting toward trucking. In that field, May Mobility's pattern is distinctive: real paid commercial deployments in 12-plus cities, driverless service live in at least one, OEM and ride-share partnerships locked in, and a capital base that did not require burning $5B to get here.

For Ann Arbor, May is the marquee mobility story. It validates the U-M robotics pipeline as commercially productive. It puts an autonomous shuttle on the streets where readers of this site live. And the Lyft partnership announced in 2025 means the company is one consumer-facing rollout away from being the most-recognized Ann Arbor tech brand outside of Duo Security.

Related

FAQ

Who founded May Mobility? Edwin Olson and Alisyn Malek founded May Mobility in 2017. Olson is a University of Michigan robotics professor and director of the APRIL Lab. Malek is a U-M alum who previously worked on mobility programs at GM and Techstars Mobility in Detroit.

How much funding has May Mobility raised? Approximately $307M across Series A through Series D, with a 2025 strategic investment led by Grab to fund Southeast Asia expansion. Toyota Ventures has participated in every priced round.

Is May Mobility actually driverless? Yes. May Mobility runs driverless commercial service in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. Driver-out testing runs in Sun City, Arizona and on Ann Arbor streets.

Where is May Mobility headquartered? Ann Arbor, Michigan, at 1100 N. Main Street. The company's operations, engineering, and most of its 342-person workforce sit in town.

What is the Lyft partnership? May Mobility and Lyft announced a robotaxi deployment partnership in 2025, with the first city being Atlanta. May provides the autonomous driving stack and fleet operations; Lyft provides the consumer-facing ride-hailing surface.

What does May Mobility do that other AV companies do not? May Mobility focuses on low-speed, route-fixed microtransit in geofenced cities, using a multi-policy decision-making (MPDM) architecture rather than a monolithic end-to-end driving model. The thesis is that real revenue from real cities now compounds faster than chasing a general autonomous driving stack.