Autonomous Vehicle Startup Zoox Names Intel Executive Aicha Evans as CEO
The Senegal native will become one of the most high-profile black women running a Silicon Valley tech company
Autonomous vehicle startup Zoox Inc. has named veteran Intel Corp. INTC -1.19% executive Aicha Evans its new CEO, recruiting a seasoned manager to replace its ousted founder as the company attempts to reinvent the car.
Ms. Evans is chief strategy officer at Intel where she spent the past 12 years in various roles, including as head of the communication and device group overseeing the company’s efforts to sell chips for mobile phones. In 2017, Ms. Evans became responsible for the chip company’s long-term strategy, including a push into autonomous vehicles, after she nearly left amid other management changes.
She begins at Zoox on Feb. 26. Her hiring makes Ms. Evans, born in Senegal and raised in Paris, one of the most high-profile black women running a Silicon Valley tech company.
She succeeds Tim Kentley-Klay, the co-founder who was removed as CEO by Zoox’s board last August after the company had completed a $500 million round that valued the company at $3.2 billion.
At the time of his ouster, Mr. Kentley-Klay said in a statement that the board abruptly fired him and “chose a path of fear, optimizing for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the universe.”
Mr. Kentley-Klay, an Australian designer, co-founded the company in 2014 with Jesse Levinson, who had made a name for himself in self-driving car development at Stanford University.
Zoox, with about 700 employees, is betting it can develop both the self-driving software and an entirely new electric vehicle for a robot taxi service. Zoox’s vision is to create a vehicle with an interior that looks like a lounge, for traveling within an urban area. The vehicle would be summoned by a smartphone.
Ms. Evans, an engineer, said she was attracted by Zoox’s focus on urban services and its approach to building a vehicle rather than retrofitting cars made for drivers into driverless vehicles. “It’s about executing and scaling,” she said in an interview about the role ahead. “If we weren’t building it from the ground up, I wouldn’t be interested.”
The Foster City, Calif., company is testing its technology and planning to deploy its mobility service in 2020 but hasn’t yet named where that might occur.
Intel is searching for a CEO of its own after Brian Krzanich resigned last summer for violating company policy by having a relationship with a co-worker. His departure followed other high-level executive departures at the chip giant. Under Mr. Krzanich, Intel has made a push into autonomous vehicle technology following its 2017$15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye NV, a leader in sensors for assisted-driving features.
An Intel spokeswoman said it thanks Ms. Evans for her leadership and contributions to the company. “We wish her well in her new endeavors and look forward to continuing to partner with her and Zoox, which is an Intel customer.”
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com