Michigan-based May Mobility, an autonomous vehicle technology start-up, made headlines recently as it unveiled an electric, autonomous minibus in partnership with European electric bus manufacturer Tecnobus during the CES 2025 event.
The company is known for offering on-demand and fixed-route autonomous shuttles on American campuses and in planned communities. The start-up’s fleet consists of 40 Toyota Sienna minivans, which have been retrofitted with May Mobility’s software and hardware self-driving stack, and can seat up to eight passengers.
The Tecnobus vehicles, which May Mobility says will join its fleet of Siennas in late 2026, can carry up to 30 passengers, including those in wheelchairs.
Aiming to build a “safer, greener, more accessible world,” May Mobility states that its Tecnobus minibus is designed for urban transit, corporate campuses, airports, and planned communities, with swappable batteries that minimise downtime. The vehicle has also reportedly been approved for use in Europe and Canada.
As of January 2025, the start-up is operating shuttle services with a driver behind the wheel in Arlington, Texas; Detroit, Michigan; and Grand Rapids, Minnesota, among other cities. May Mobility also has a presence in Japan, where telecom company NTT has agreed to license the technology for an autonomous vehicle pilot project in the city of Nagoya. May also has active deployments in Tokyo and Fukuoka.
In today’s episode of “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will delve into the company’s details.
AV Technology That Imagines Every Possibility
May Mobility claims that its autonomous vehicle technology surpasses the standard frameworks used by its industry peers by employing a patented, real-time learning system that makes the best possible moment-by-moment driving decisions. With this system, the start-up is bringing safe, accessible, autonomous rides to more places—whether urban, suburban, or rural.
“The cornerstone of our technology lies in our Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) system, which is a major advancement over other AVs in the industry. MPDM is a real-time, reinforcement-learning AI algorithm that isn’t limited by training data collected ahead of time. Our vehicles generate training examples relevant to their current environment and learn while driving—every 200 milliseconds! This technology amplifies our system’s ability to learn and react to new situations and driving scenarios over the traditional approaches used by other companies,” the start-up stated.
The MPDM technology addresses the biggest challenge in autonomous driving: safely handling the unexpected. These endless real-time, on-board simulations allow every vehicle to choose the most applicable next step and drive safely in each situation. With MPDM, providers can safely deploy AVs at a fraction of the cost and time, bringing more reliable, safe, and efficient autonomous transportation to more people, faster.
Backed by strategic partnerships with industry leaders, including Toyota and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation), May Mobility is disrupting the autonomous vehicle industry with one of the most practical vehicle offerings available. The company has completed over 400,000 autonomy-enabled rides across 18 deployments worldwide.
Discussing MPDM, the AI algorithm integrates real-time data every 200 milliseconds to ensure safety and efficiency, while pairing live, online learning with traditional offline training, enabling rapid global deployment at half the cost and a fraction of the time.
The start-up’s latest electric, autonomous minibus will enhance May Mobility’s mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings and advance sustainable transportation. The vehicle has been designed for urban transit, corporate campuses, airports, planned communities, and more.
Understanding The Technology In Detail
With the ability to process thousands of “what if” scenarios every second, MPDM rapidly devises a smart driving strategy fine-tuned to the vehicle’s current situation, making split-second decisions that address every possible environmental condition.
MPDM has become an unparallelled innovation, helping the start-up become one of the only companies in the United States to carry riders without a safety driver, achieving this feat with a fraction of the resources required by its peers.
MPDM contains many components that work together to ensure the safety of riders and other road users. These components include a suite of redundant systems (ranging from redundant power to sensor communication), a robust fallback safety system, and active monitoring and vehicle guidance (tele-assist) in the event of unknown situations.
These critical safety components support the vehicles’ sensor stack and MPDM technology, which has the unique ability to predict potential hazards via constant simulations that allow the start-up’s vehicles to react quickly with safe, predictable vehicle movements.
May Mobility has become one of the AV companies to commit publicly to conforming its safety programme to UL 4600—the first comprehensive safety standard for fully autonomous vehicles.
The Arlington RAPID Case Study
In partnership with transit agencies, cities, states, and other stakeholders, May Mobility’s autonomous vehicle solutions are solving problems unique to communities, from filling transit gaps to growing ridership and revenue.
The start-up’s autonomous vehicle deployments in the United States and Japan have been in pedestrian-dense college towns, rural communities, and a broad range of other real-world environments, to help urban centres overcome transit barriers and connect people and neighbourhoods, thereby creating a thriving, greener, and interconnected community.
May Mobility’s “Transit Approach” focuses on autonomous on-demand and circulator services that create vital first- and last-mile solutions, sustainably improving connectivity, health, and wellbeing in underserved areas while helping local administrations introduce more convenient services in these neighbourhoods.
One prominent example of this operational philosophy has been May Mobility’s service deployment in Arlington, Texas. This service integrates seamlessly into an existing public transit network in Arlington known as Arlington RAPID (Rideshare Automation and Payment Integration Demonstration).
Supported by a USD 1.7 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration’s Integrated Mobility Innovation Programme to the City of Arlington, Texas, May Mobility incorporated five AVs (including one wheelchair-accessible AV) into Via’s existing on-demand public transit service in the city in March 2021. This service, known as Arlington RAPID, is a partnership between May Mobility, Via, the City of Arlington, and the University of Texas at Arlington.
In its first year, RAPID grew to an average daily ridership of 162 and an acceptance rate of 70%, meaning nearly three-fourths of customers preferred an AV over a conventional vehicle. Arlington RAPID reported a 99% on-time performance, and the vehicles were able to operate fully autonomously 80% of the time.
As of January 2025, Arlington RAPID still serves downtown Arlington and the University of Texas at Arlington campus for the benefit of students and other riders. Apart from completing over 153,000 miles, the service has seen a 92% repeat ridership rate and consistently maintains a 4.9/5 rider approval rating from more than 61,000 riders.
What makes RAPID so special? It provides a flexible and accessible public mobility option for an area where nearly two-fifths of households live below the poverty line, and one-fifth includes a person with a disability.
Customers without smartphones can access RAPID by telephone, including account setup, ride payment, booking, and directions to pick-up locations. The solution can also process payments via credit/debit cards or prepaid debit cards, which riders can purchase with cash at local stores.
A Promising Future Ahead
In March 2024, May Mobility was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the Automotive category, due to its differentiated business-to-government (B2G) and business-to-business (B2B) go-to-market strategy and MPDM technology. In the same year, the start-up launched a corporate autonomous vehicle (AV) service that utilises Toyota’s e-Palette mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) vehicle platform in Fukuoka, Japan, at Toyota Motor’s Miyata factory.
The venture also expanded its operations in the American city of Ann Arbor, which is the next step toward expanding autonomous driver-out vehicle services commercially across the United States and Japan alongside key partners, including Toyota and Lyft.
Speaking of Lyft, one of the largest transportation network companies in North America, it announced a multi-year partnership with May Mobility to launch autonomous vehicles through the “Lyft App.” The company will launch the first deployment in Atlanta in 2025, using May Mobility’s Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS vehicles.