A developer of self-driving vehicle technology took more office space in north Fort Worth.
Autonomous Solutions Inc. develops tech to create autonomous equipment and industrial vehicles, such as bulldozers, tractors, lawn mowers and excavators.
The company is more than doubling its office space in the three-story Hillwood Commons I at 9800 Hillwood Pkwy. The company will expand from 11,097 square feet to 25,806 square feet across the second and third floors of the 154,063-square-foot building built by Hillwood.
Hillwood is the developer of the 27,000-acre AllianceTexas, along with Hillwood Commons, a 900-acre mixed-use district.
More than 100 employees will work in the office, according to Autonomous Solutions. Right now, the company has eight job postings for its Fort Worth operations, according to its website. Positions include field testers and mechanical and electrical engineers. Mel Torrie, co-founder and CEO of ASI, said that AllianceTexas makes sense for the company.
“What sets AllianceTexas apart is the ability to grow our company in the same place where we test and demonstrate our technology,” Torrie said in a statement. “We can put autonomous systems through real-world scenarios, bring customers and partners in to see the technology at work and have the space to expand our team, giving us the flexibility we need as we continue to scale.”
Autonomous Solutions already tests the technology it develops at the AllianceTexas Test Center, north of State Highway 114. Ian Kinne, vice president of logistics innovation and investments at Hillwood, told the Fort Worth Business Journal that the autonomous tech company planted its flag in Alliance last year.
The company fits into a larger ecosystem of companies testing autonomous vehicles at Alliance, from flying taxis to automated box cars at Hillwood’s Mobility Innovation Zone. Many of the companies involved in autonomous vehicles operate in a testing facility with an office nearby.
“What’s different here is they were willing to kind of separate those two functions into a multi-site campus,” Kinne said. “So part of that was just the space needed to test big equipment like this versus the office setting you want to attract top talent into. And so we were able to have that, which is I think really unique to Alliance.”