Built it. Shipped it. No agenda.
The person telling you what to build has already shipped it to millions.
Vendor-neutral advisory on IVI, SDV, and connected-vehicle platforms — from 17+ years building and launching them inside a premium German OEM. No delivery bench. No platform license. Nothing to sell you but the judgment.
- vehicles activated in 6 weeks
- 900K+vehicles activated in 6 weeks
- connected vehicles managed
- 1M+connected vehicles managed
- subscription platform built
- $100M+subscription platform built
- portfolio owned, 2M+ users
- $10M+portfolio owned, 2M+ users
The gap
Automotive software advice tends to come from one of three places, and each has a built-in flaw.
That leaves a gap: deep engineering substance and structural neutrality, in the same person. That gap is what Aull Ventures fills.
Engineering houses
Real depth — but the advice routes toward billable builds and licenses.
Aull Ventures
Deep, hands-on engineering substance with nothing to sell. The open quadrant.
Strategy firms
Brand and slide decks, but rarely anyone who has owned a vehicle launch.
Solo ex-executives
Independent, but most have managed at altitude — not shipped to fleets.
How we work together
Three ways to put senior judgment to work.
Expert Briefings
A focused call when you need a senior, conflict-free read. Diligence questions, a technical thesis, a build-vs-buy call, a market trend explained by someone who lived it.
Learn moreAdvisory Engagements
Fractional senior engineering leadership and strategy. Architecture review, program rescue, rollout strategy, and the cross-functional sequencing that decides whether a feature ships on time.
Learn moreMarket Entry & Growth
Go-to-market and partnership strategy for software firms entering automotive or expanding into the U.S. and abroad — from someone who sat in that buyer's chair.
Learn moreThe work, not the words
Anonymized case studies. Real numbers.
A conversational GenAI feature live in 900K+ vehicles inside six weeks. An app that grew into a $100M+ subscription business. A release cadence that went from 4 to 26 a year with 30% less cycle time.
Premium German OEM
Conversational GenAI to 900K+ vehicles in six weeks
Ship the first production conversational GenAI feature to a live fleet on a fixed, weeks-long window — across five-plus org boundaries with no prior playbook.
900K+ vehicles activated in 6 weeks
Premium German OEM
From utility app to $100M+ subscription platform
Turn a useful mobile utility into a paid consumer revenue platform across 1M+ connected vehicles — without breaking the experience customers already relied on.
$100M+ subscription platform
Selected references
Named advisory clients, plus confidential and expert-network engagements kept anonymized by agreement.
- Edenspiekermann
U.S. & international expansion advisory
- Appsfactory
Digital product & automotive software
- A premium German OEM
IVI, connected services & production GenAI delivery
- PE / VC investors & expert networks
Diligence-grade expert briefings
Who's behind the advice
17+ years inside premium automotive R&D.
Stephan Aull spent 17+ years inside premium automotive R&D — Daimler AG in Germany and Mercedes-Benz R&D in North America. He owned the U.S. delivery path for the first OEM production conversational GenAI launch and the entitlement architecture across more than a million connected vehicles. Aull Ventures is the practice he built to do that work independently, with nothing to sell but the call.
Find your path
Where do you sit?
OEM / Tier-1
Senior engineering judgment on IVI, AAOS, OTA, and progressive rollout — from someone who has been on your side of the launch.
Advisory EngagementsSoftware firm / founder
Win automotive clients and expand into the U.S. — positioning and target accounts from the enterprise buyer’s chair.
Market Entry & GrowthInvestor / consulting firm
Conflict-free, diligence-grade technical judgment on automotive software platforms — no vendor bias baked in.
For InvestorsField notes
On the decisions that move connected-vehicle programs.
Short, specific writing on GenAI in production, entitlement architecture, and the org boundaries where features quietly die. No frameworks for their own sake.
genai
What it actually takes to ship GenAI to a live vehicle fleet
Demos are easy; production fleets are not. Shipping conversational GenAI to 900K+ vehicles in six weeks came down to operations and rollout discipline, not model choice — gating activation with entitlements, sequencing five org boundaries, and deciding what "safe enough to launch" means when the fleet is already on the road.
6 min read
Readentitlements
Entitlements are the product: feature flags as revenue infrastructure
Most teams treat feature flags as a deployment convenience. At fleet scale they become the spine of the business — the layer that decides who gets what, enables paid journeys, and lets you launch, beta, and experiment without all-or-nothing risk.
7 min read
Readbuild-vs-buy
Build, buy, or kill: how to make the call without a vendor in the room
The hardest connected-vehicle decisions aren't technical — they're about who you ask. Advice from a firm that profits when you build is structurally tilted. A plain method for pressure-testing a build-vs-buy decision, the questions that surface a hidden conflict, and how to recognize the feature you should kill before it kills your timeline.
5 min read
ReadBring the hard call.
Build-vs-buy, a rollout that stalled, a thesis you need pressure-tested, a U.S. entry you're sizing up. One call tells you whether there's something here worth your time.