Deep-tech startup IVEX has raised €5m (US$5.8m) Series A funding to accelerate its engineering roadmap and expands its presence in the USA and Asia. The round was backed by previous investors The Faktory and Dedicated, alongside private investors.
Assessing increasingly sophisticated advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technologies requires manufacturers and testing organizations to analyze large volumes of camera, sensor and vehicle data. During on-road testing, engineers have traditionally reviewed footage, identified road signs and conditions, compared them with dashboard data and assessed the vehicle’s response. This manual process is difficult to scale without increasing engineering resources.
IVEX was developed to address this challenge using computer vision, AI and cloud-based data processing to automate aspects of on-road vehicle safety testing. The platform can interpret the vehicle’s surroundings, including speed limits and road signs, read information displayed to the driver and compare these data sources. The analysis can then assess whether the vehicle recognized relevant road information and responded according to the applicable safety protocol.
The company uses a human-in-the-loop model, enabling engineers to review its output and retain control over the final assessment. The technology can reduce engineering time spent analyzing data by more than 95%; in one example, it processed 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data using eight hours of engineering time.
“Vehicle safety testing generates enormous amounts of data, but much of its analysis still depends on repetitive manual work,” said Mario Torres, co-founder and CEO of IVEX. “AI and rigorous mathematical algorithms allows us to make the testing process significantly faster and more scalable while keeping engineers in control and ensuring that every result remains traceable to the original data. With this funding, we can deepen the capabilities of our platform and bring IVEX technology to North America and Asia.”
IVEX’s long-term goal is to develop an AI-powered platform for automotive safety testing, with different safety protocols, testing requirements and vehicle functions operating as applications. The company says its underlying models will improve as the platform processes data from additional vehicles and driving environments, supporting the development of further safety-testing applications.
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