Tier IV was founded in December 2015 by Dr. Shinpei Kato (then at Nagoya University, now a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo) to develop a fully-autonomous  self-driving platform based on their open source software “Autoware” which Dr. Kato created while he was at Nagoya University.

Tier IV provides fully autonomous self-driving platforms and services based on “Autoware”, an open-source software based on Linux and ROS. Tier IV’s platform strategy involves offering optimized configuration of software and hardware necessary for each ODD (Operational Design Domain) as a Reference Design. In December 2017, Tier IV became the first company to deploy a Level 4 self-driving vehicle on Japan’s public roads.

UTEC assists TierIV in building its management team, building capital and business alliances, etc.