The Drive's Alex Roy likes to ask who the "Theranos of self-driving cars" is, and now we might have an answer... as well as one of the defining stories of the great autonomous drive technology "trough of disillusionment." Less than one year ago, Roadstar.ai raised $138 million from the likes of Shenzen Venture Capital Group, Wu Capital, Yunqi Partners and others to build a test fleet, collect data, and develop autonomous drive systems. Now, the unthinkable has happened: co-founder and former CTO Zhou Gang has reportedly been booted from the company amid allegations that he took kickbacks from investors, and faked data both for internal reporting and for a government regulatory report. Zhou's co-founders made the allegations against him via the company's WeChat account, which Sina.com reports as

1. Long-term non-compliance with the company's internal code management rules and regulations, privately open the code library private drawings, deliberately do not upload the code and repeatedly teach, in the process of project delivery, the partner found its technical report with the private code and file fraud, Seriously affect the company’s reputation and project delivery progress; 2. Deliberately fraudulent data in a government regulatory report, discovered by third-party agencies, has a serious impact on the company's reputation; 3. Take the lead in destroying the internal financial rules and regulations of the company, and there is a phenomenon of fake public and private. In the A round of financing, use their own classmates to receive kickbacks.

Guang was reportedly in Japan for the Tokyo Motor Show when the announcement was made, and at least one investor released a statement saying Zhou's dismissal was "detrimental to the core interests of the comany and shareholders, and violated the relevant agreement with investors." Investors have confirmed that they were unaware of Zhou's ouster, and Zhou's staff released a statement saying "the problem has already touched the legal level.” There are reports of ongoing battles between Zhou and his two other co-founders, former head of maps and localization for Baidu Yan Xianqiao and former technical lead for sensing at Baidu Liang Heng. Yan and Liang told Tech Sina (via Pandaily):

“Back then, we were all friends at Baidu Research Institute USA, and we didn’t care much about it. However, his (Zhou) shortages are exposed when it comes to conflicts of major interests in the long term.”

Founded in 2017, Roadstar was packed with talent and ambition, with core team members coming from self-driving efforts at Apple, Tesla, NVIDIA and Baidu. Now-disgraced co-founder Zhou Gang went straight from earning his PhD to Baidu's Silicon Valley R&D center, but left quickly to start Roadstar according to an interview with Sina.com. Sina notes that "Roadstar.ai can be said to be a microcosm of arrogant arrogance in China in the past year," quoting Zhou as explaining his departure from Baidu