Tier IV was founded in December 2015 by Dr. Shinpei Kato, currently an associate professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo. Tier IV is developing 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.