Valgo

Algorithmic safety validation tools for autonomy.

Risk quantification platform to insure physical AI

As autonomy moves into complex safety-critical domains (e.g., aviation), failures become more costly and companies must devote significant in-house effort to validate their system before real-world deployment. Valgo accelerates autonomous systems development and certification by providing tooling to perform algorithmic safety validation at scale. We are building a platform to efficiently find rare and realistic failure events in simulation at a fraction of the compute cost required by existing approaches. Our tools are agnostic to models/simulators (i.e., black box) and can be applied across industries such as autonomous vehicles, aviation, robotics, space, defense, energy, and finance. Valgo was founded by Stanford PhDs who wrote the textbook and taught the course at Stanford on algorithmic safety validation. We also have significant industry experience working on an FAA-certified collision avoidance system at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, validating autonomous aircraft at Xwing, and collaborating with industry sponsors across transportation, aviation, and energy.

Insurers struggle to price autonomous systems because the historical data simply doesn't exist. Your car insurance draws from over 30 billion claims records, but autonomous trucks and robots have nearly zero. Valgo is the risk quantification platform that closes that gap. We are building probabilistic models of routes, tasks, and environments from the bottom up. We output a simulated loss estimate that insurers need to price coverage. Valgo is the foundational layer that gives insurance providers confidence to properly price autonomy risk. Our team combines expertise in risk estimation for autonomy with deep experience in the insurance industry. Sydney and Robert are Stanford PhDs who wrote the textbook on validating safety-critical systems and teach the course at Stanford. Robert spent 7 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the core team that designed and validated an FAA-certified aircraft collision avoidance system, now a worldwide standard. Jon is a Sloan Fellow from the Stanford GSB who spent over 12 years in insurance leadership and led over $5 billion in M&A as head of corporate development for one of the largest insurers in Asia-Pacific.