https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps-nearly-10-... It's possible that they relied too much on remote assistance. Really hard to say what state their tech is in and what stage investors want to see before putting in cash.

> “We beat Waymo. We beat all the big OEMs. We’ve beat just about the whole industry,” says Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, founder and CEO of the San Francisco based start-up.

I find this statement pretty disingenuous when Waymo is trying to tackle the part of the problem Starsky isn't able to solve with their own self-driving tech - driving without a human in the loop for the last mile.

Given they beat all these big players their valuation should be extremely high

You should check your figures. I believe Drive.ai, one of the leaders in the industry, was acquired for about $500,000 an engineer last summer. The numbers you are thinking of are more appropriate during 2016-2018 when the hype train was at full speed. Last summer there was a palpable feeling that the industry was beginning to 'consolidate'. I would not be surprised if all of the non-OEM, non-Google backed AV companies go bust soon.