Darren Liccardo

Bio

Darren has spent the majority of his career as an engineering executive working in the aerospace and automotive industries with a focus on autonomous systems. Prior to co-founding Catapult Ventures, Darren served as VP of engineering at DJI, where he established its Silicon Valley office focused on advanced R&D and business development in emerging industrial markets. Before joining DJI, Darren was the founding Director of Tesla’s Autopilot engineering group where he built the team and technology that shipped Tesla’s first autopilot system. Earlier in his career, Darren led BMW’s North American autonomous driving research efforts at the BMW Technology Office. He was also responsible for scouting new technology in support of BMW’s first internal venture fund. Prior to that, Darren worked as Director of Inertial Systems for Crossbow Technology, a startup that developed the first FAA-certified aircraft navigation system using commercial MEMS solid-state sensors. Darren has also been an active angel investor and advisor for early stage companies including Starsky Robotics, Swift Navigation, Baraja, Auro Robotics, Deepscale, Polysync, and RightHook. Darren holds numerous patents covering a range of sensing, perception, and state estimation technologies for robotic systems. Darren is a Silicon Valley native with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he did research on UAV sensing and control systems.