Stack AV

Bryan Salesky came up through Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center, where he led software engineering for Tartan Racing, the CMU team that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. He then spent years at Google's self-driving car project, directing hardware development, before co-founding Argo AI in 2016 as its CEO. Argo landed a $1 billion investment from Ford and later billions more from Volkswagen, growing to thousands of employees before both backers pulled out and the company shut down in October 2022. Within a year Salesky reassembled Argo's core leadership to found Stack AV in Pittsburgh in 2023, backed by more than $1 billion from SoftBank Group. As CEO he redirected the team's decade of autonomy experience from robotaxis to Level 4 autonomous trucking, arguing that freight — with its driver shortages, safety record, and utilization economics — is where self-driving technology delivers value soonest.

Peter Rander is a Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticist who spent well over a decade at CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center before joining Uber's Advanced Technologies Group as an engineering lead when Uber famously hired away much of NREC in 2015. In 2016 he co-founded Argo AI with Bryan Salesky and served as its president through the company's rise and October 2022 shutdown. He co-founded Stack AV in 2023, reprising the president role and overseeing the development and deployment of the company's autonomous trucking system.

Brett Browning is an Australian-born roboticist who spent more than a decade as a research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and National Robotics Engineering Center, working on perception and field robotics. He moved to Uber's Advanced Technologies Group in 2015, then joined Argo AI in 2017, rising to executive vice president and CTO. At Stack AV, which he co-founded with Salesky and Rander in 2023, he again serves as chief technology officer, responsible for the full self-driving stack — perception, prediction, planning, and the AI infrastructure behind it.