May Mobility is expanding its autonomous vehicle (AV) technology into Southeast Asia through a strategic partnership with Grab. This collaboration involves an investment from Grab, facilitating the introduction of May Mobility's AVs to the region.

Many innovations have a crucial graduation date: when they move from speculative RD to real-world deployment and utility.One of the more significant transitions underway is the rise of “autonomy as a service” (AaaS), a model where self-driving capabilities are not just embedded in cars but delivered as scalable platforms that are often entirely devoid of human drivers. This, in turn, is giving rise to “driver-out” vehicles: machines that operate with no safety driver on board, signaling a bold leap toward fully autonomous logistics and mobility systems. Look no further for the tech’s graduation date than May Mobility’s recent partnership with Uber to provide thousands of vehicles with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology for proof of where the landscape could be heading. “We know from the Waymo service that people are willing to wait longer for an autonomous vehicle. They’re willing to pay more, they prefer it so strongly,” Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility, told PYMNTS. “And for companies like Uber, they know they need to be able to compete with that.”

May Mobility, a U.S. autonomous driving technology developer, has received a strategic investment of ¥1 billion (approximately $7 million) from Japanese trading company Itochu. The investment aims to introduce May Mobility's autonomous driving technology to the Japanese market.