Edwin Olson | Source | CEO and Co-Founder at May Mobility

Edwin Olson is co-founder and CEO of May Mobility, Inc. He has focused on the development of autonomous vehicles for almost two decades, co-leading autonomous vehicle development at Toyota Research Institute and helping to develop Ford Motor Company’s autonomous vehicles. He has a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and is a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. He was named one of Crain’s Detroit Business’ Notable Leaders in Energy in 2023. Ed founded May Mobility in 2017, and attended Y Combinator’s summer cohort that year. May’s been named one of Y Combinator’s top companies three years in a row.

Olson got his start in autonomous technology participating in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 as part of the MIT team, and went on to lead the winning team from the University of Michigan for the Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) in 2010. He worked on a variety of approaches to AV technology before settling on what would become May Mobility’s proprietary Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) system. MPDM takes a fundamentally finer, more scalable approach to autonomy, using real-time on-board simulation to imagine thousands of possible futures per second to determine which actions are safe and comfortable.