Zimbabwe’s William Sachiti Invented a Self-Driving Car

Zimbabwean born Pasi William Sachiti, is a serial entrepreneur and inventor. His latest invention is a self-driving car. He is the founder and CEO of Academy of Robotics, a driverless-car manufacturing company based in the UK.

As an inventor-entrepreneur he devised several patents on driverless vehicle technology, including drone delivery systems such as SkyHighway. After nearly two years at Aberystwyth University and then finishing off his training with NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute, William built a team of engineers and scientists to found the Academy of Robotics. William is considered one of the leaders of the UK autonomous car space with regular appearances on TV, press and government panels as an industry expert.

At 19, Sachiti started his first start-up 123-registration, a domain registration business which was acquired year after its inception. Sachiti first reached the public eye after appearing on the BBC investment programme Dragons’ Den, where he was seeking 65K for his company Clever Bins. Sachiti was unable to raise the funding. The company nevertheless continued to trade for three years, during which time it successfully licensed its technology to 6 countries and local governments, before closing in 2013.

In 2013, Sachiti founded mycityvenue, a digital concierge and holiday company which grew to approximately 1.6 million users before it was acquired by UK holiday company Secret Escapes.

He studied at Aberystwyth University in Wales, majoring in artificial intelligence and robotics. While at university, he was credited with inventing the world’s first artificially intelligent robot librarian, Hugh. The robot was capable of holding a conversation or taking verbal commands and would be able to navigate users to any one of several million books in the library.

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