Backbone is the operations partner for autonomous vehicle companies going commercial. Depot operations, fleet maintenance, field response, fleet financing, and a 28-module operations platform with zero write access to your AV systems, guaranteed.
Every AV company hitting commercial deployment runs into the same operational wall. These aren't engineering problems. They're fleet problems. And you shouldn't be solving them.
Charging, staging, and maintenance space. 15,000 to 25,000 sq ft with 50+ charging bays. $3-5M per location. Your investors backed you to build autonomy software, not to become a real estate developer.
Charging schedules, cleaning, sensor calibration, incident response. When a camera is obstructed at 2 AM, someone has to respond in under 45 minutes. You need a dedicated ops team in every market.
Deploying 100 vehicles requires $20M+ in capital. That money shouldn't come off your balance sheet. You need structured fleet financing, SPVs, institutional debt, and most AV companies have never built a debt facility.
Real-time readiness tracking, SLA dashboards, charging operations, incident management, worker mobile apps, shift management. The fleet tools that exist today were built for trucking companies, not for AV-grade uptime with 18-hour duty cycles and autonomy boundaries.
Backbone is a single accountability layer for everything between your AV technology and the road. One SLA. One partner. One operations stack that scales with you city by city.
We orchestrate the depots your fleet runs out of — charging, staging, cleaning, maintenance, and vehicle readiness — while our infrastructure partners handle the buildout. You get a fully staffed, SLA-managed facility without building or leasing anything yourself.
Your vehicles run 18-22 hours a day. We make sure they are always ready. Preventive maintenance, 3-tier incident management, and dedicated field teams, all under a single SLA with contractual response times.
We structure the capital so you can deploy without balance-sheet burden. SPV-based fleet financing backed by your commercial contracts, with real-time financier-grade transparency through a dedicated Investor Portal showing per-vehicle economics, utilization, and DSCR.
Proprietary software purpose-built for AV fleet operations. 28 modules across ops, worker mobile, reporting, and admin, with a dedicated AV Partner Portal so you see everything we see. Autonomy-native from day one: zero write access to your AV systems, infrastructure-enforced.
We designed the engagement model to move at your speed. You have vehicles to deploy.
We learn your fleet size, city targets, vehicle specs, and operational requirements.
We formalize the partnership: fleet readiness % targets, MTTR commitments, pricing per vehicle.
Our infrastructure partners stand up the depot. We activate operations, structure the SPV, and deploy field teams.
Your fleet is charged, maintained, and road-ready. Your team gets a dedicated AV Partner Portal with real-time readiness and SLA proof.
Backbone is a spinoff from MAX, Africa's largest private mobility fleet. Every challenge you face deploying AVs in US cities (field response, fleet financing, vendor SLAs, uptime management) we solved across 11 countries with far less infrastructure than exists in Houston.
We are also neutral by design. Backbone is AV-agnostic. We work with any autonomous vehicle platform, not exclusively with one. Your competitive intelligence stays yours. And our autonomy boundary is infrastructure-enforced: FleetOps OS has zero write access to your AV systems. We operate the fleet. We never touch the stack.
Texas is the most permissive large AV state with no state-level permit required for commercial deployment. Four major AV companies are already active or expanding here. The depot infrastructure to support them does not exist yet.
Backbone assembles city-level ecosystems: AV technology, energy infrastructure, and local operations, under one SLA and one accountability layer.
We partner with autonomous vehicle companies deploying commercially, providing the full operations stack so they can focus on scaling their technology.
Depot charging requires purpose-built energy infrastructure. We work with charging network operators to co-develop depot-grade facilities with Level 2 and DC fast charging.
Every city needs local field teams for incident response, vehicle coordination, and on-the-ground execution. We embed local ops partners into our SLA framework.
Co-founded MAX, Africa's largest private mobility fleet: 60,000+ vehicles, 700M+ trips, $100M+ raised. MIT alum. Built fleet operations from zero across 11 countries, including structured fleet financing with zero defaults. Now building the same operational infrastructure for autonomous vehicles.
You know more about AV technology than we ever will. That is the point. We know more about running 60,000 vehicles under real operational and financial pressure than any AV company does.
No one is asking us to write autonomy software. They are asking us to deliver fleet readiness as a service: vehicles charged, clean, maintained, and road-ready every day under an SLA. We built 28 software modules, documented 57 operational edge cases, and designed the whole system with an infrastructure-enforced autonomy boundary. That is what a decade of fleet operations produces.
Tell us about your fleet, your timeline, and your target city. We will put together a deployment scope and SLA framework within a week.