Levandowski was once known as the global expert in autonomous vehicles. He spent 15 years developing the technology. No one denies he made vital contributions to the self-driving car industry and he went on to create multiple successful startup ventures.
Levandowski first joined Alphabet-owned Google in 2007, as a software engineer working on Google Maps’ Street View. About a year later, while he still worked at Google, Levandoski formed a startup, Anthony’s Robots. Both on and off the job he continued to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and self-driving technology.
After a successful test of Levandowski’s PriBot, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin embraced the self-driving car project. Google’s self-driving car project “Project Chauffeur” later became Waymo LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Prior to leaving Waymo parent company Alphabet in 2016, prosecutors allege that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 Project Chauffeur documents. Levandowski admitted to taking the data from his work computer and downloading it to his personal laptop in December 2015, weeks before he left the company.
