Autonoma, Inc

Autonoma: Simulation Is the Foundation of Safe Autonomy

Founded: 2022
Invested: Valor led seed round in 2023
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Autonomy, Defense, Infrastructure

Autonoma authors the simulation infrastructure that allows autonomous systems to be tested, validated, and trusted—before they operate in the real world.

Why Valor Invested

When Valor first invested in Autonoma, autonomy was crossing a critical threshold: no longer a research problem, but an operational one.

Spun out of Auburn University’s Ground Vehicle Systems Lab (GAVLAB), Autonoma was founded by Will Bryan, Ph.D, who had experienced firsthand the gap between academic autonomy models and real-world behavior. As a graduate student, Bryan wrote code controlling steering, throttle, and braking for a self-driving vehicle—then found himself repeatedly grabbing the wheel when simulations failed to predict reality.

“What you learn very quickly,” Bryan has said, “is that you need to thoroughly test these systems before you ever put a human in the car.”

That insight shaped Autonoma’s core thesis: autonomy will not scale without simulation that accurately reflects real-world physics, sensors, and edge cases. Existing tools were too abstract, too slow, or too disconnected from live systems to support safety-critical deployment.

Valor invested because Autonoma was not trying to build autonomy itself—but the infrastructure autonomy requires to earn trust. That distinction has only grown more relevant as AI systems move into airports, logistics hubs, cities, and defense environments where mistakes compound quickly.

Why This Technology Matters Now

Autonomous systems face a fundamental constraint: validating safety through real-world testing alone is impractical.

Industry estimates suggest autonomous systems would need to drive billions of physical miles to statistically outperform human drivers. That approach is slow, expensive, and insufficient for complex, multi-agent environments like airports or urban infrastructure.

As a result, the autonomy market is shifting decisively toward simulation-first development. McKinsey estimates the broader automotive software and electronics market—including autonomy-enabling systems—could reach $462B by 2030, while autonomous mobility applications continue to expand across logistics, aviation, defense, and infrastructure.

Autonoma’s relevance was recently demonstrated at the highest level of autonomous performance: the A2RL Season 2 Grand Final in Abu Dhabi. Six fully driverless racecars competed wheel-to-wheel at speeds exceeding 250 km/h, executing overtakes and defensive maneuvers that required split-second AI decision-making.

Teams using Autonoma’s AutoVerse platform ran thousands of simulated scenarios—overtakes, collisions, failure modes—before ever reaching the Yas Marina Circuit. In one year, autonomous lap times improved from 10 seconds off professional F1 pace to within ~0.5 seconds. That leap would not have been possible without high-fidelity, multi-agent simulation.

As the winning team from the Technical University of Munich noted:

“We gathered more high-quality data in the first day using AutoVerse than in months of real-world testing.”

Racing may be extreme, but the lesson is universal: autonomy advances fastest when risk is explored virtually, not physically.

What Autonoma Does

Autonoma builds AutoVerse, a high-fidelity simulation platform designed for autonomy in complex, safety-critical environments. AutoVerse creates digital replicas of entire operational systems—vehicles, sensors, infrastructure, weather, and human behavior—allowing organizations to test decisions at scale, up to 20x faster than real time. Today, Autonoma works across:

• Airports and airlines, simulating ground operations, aircraft movements, and terminal design using real operational data

• Defense and aerospace, supporting autonomous system validation in high-risk scenarios

• Smart cities and infrastructure, modeling traffic patterns, roadway design, and pedestrian interaction

• Autonomous mobility and logistics, enabling multi-vehicle coordination and failure-mode testing

In aviation, AutoVerse is used to replicate airport environments end-to-end—helping operators de-risk new systems before deployment, improve throughput, and identify bottlenecks that would be costly or dangerous to discover live.

“Our simulations don’t just replicate vehicles,” Bryan explains. “They replicate entire environments.”

By enabling organizations to test edge cases, stress scenarios, and multi-agent interactions safely, Autonoma accelerates deployment while reducing risk—turning simulation from a support tool into the foundation of modern autonomy.