Argo AI

How it happened

Argo AI was a self-driving technology company backed by Ford and Volkswagen, valued at about $12.4B in 2021. As the timeline and cost for commercializing fully autonomous vehicles stretched out, its backers pulled support, and the company shut down abruptly in late 2022, with parts of its operations and staff absorbed into Ford and VW. Its Glassdoor afterlife is unusual for a dead startup: for years afterward, former employees kept posting affectionate reviews, lamenting the loss of the culture and blaming the funders' retreat rather than the workplace itself. A more skeptical minority recalled punishing hours and doubted the economics of driverless tech would ever have worked.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.