Alphabet-owned self-driving startup Waymo is hiring the former CEO of Anki, the robotics startup that sold millions of AI-infused toys and burned through more than $180 million in venture capital before failing earlier this year.

Boris Sofman will head up the trucking division at Waymo, bringing along a dozen engineers from Anki’s original technical team.

“While I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in robotics, it was autonomous driving that first sparked my attraction to the field and was the focus of my thesis at Carnegie Mellon,” Sofman wrote in a LinkedIn post today, first spotted by Axios.

“Throughout the last decade, I would look over at what was happening at Waymo and be inspired by the progress they were making, and the inevitable impact their technology would have on everyone’s lives in the years to come.”
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