"That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just on salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard, especially on the accelerated timescale they were working towards and the need to likely hire many more people to get to production. All of Otto’s public self-driving car and truck competitors have taken venture funding. However, as someone working on a bootstrapped SaaS application, I’m sympathetic to wanting to self-fund."

Anthony Levandowski has a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions, that is not counting the other founders plus they could raise money at a whim, or get acquired whenever they wanted

"The next day, January 15, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture 280 Systems - which

became OttoMotto LLC - was officially formed (though it remained in stealth mode for several

months). On January 27, 2016, Mr. Levandowski resigned from Waymo without notice. And on

February 1, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture Otto Trucking was officially formed (also

remaining in stealth mode for several months)."

not sure if that timeline is accurate, any way to check when the ot.to website was registered? the site used for looking up http://whois.domaintools.com/280systems.com doesn't work for ot.to