ADAS validation specialist Ottometric has secured US$4.9m in funding for the automated validation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The seed funding round was led by Rally Ventures and supported by Goodyear Ventures, Proeza Ventures, Automotive Ventures, and other key mobility funds.
Established in 2019 by experienced personnel from well-known companies such as General Motors, Autoliv, Nvidia and Optimus Ride, Ottometric benefits from a deep understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) training and validation processes.
By drawing on its breadth of knowledge in automotive electronics, AI, computer vision and big data analytics, Ottometric has developed a cloud software platform which automates and streamlines the ADAS development and validation process. The company’s first customers are described as leaders in the ADAS sector, in addition to two of the ‘top 10 largest Tier 1 automotive suppliers in the world.
Automotive OEMs and suppliers spend billions of dollars each year on the development and testing of ADAS systems which meet government regulations, while also enhancing driver safety and confidence. This development and validation process creates petabytes of data from an array of sensors that must be analyzed and validated before the start of vehicle production.
Through the use of Ottometric’s platform, the company states that these OEMs and suppliers can save millions of dollars in development and validation costs while significantly reducing time to market versus traditional, and time consuming, manual annotation and review. The platform enables customers to easily find and fix bugs in ADAS software, fostering shorter development cycles, a reduction in overall ADAS program costs and improved system reliability.
“Ottometric offers unique, game-changing technology to automate ADAS testing and validation,” said Zenas Hutcheson, venture partner at Rally Ventures. “Leveraging cloud computing, Ottometric automatically identifies critical events and anomalies that are essential for understanding real-world performance of ADAS solutions.”
“At a time when Tier 1s and OEMs are under pressure to improve the performance of their ADAS systems, Ottometric’s solution provides a step function improvement in validation efficiency and agility helping to reduce the time to production and avoid costly delays,” explained Rodolfo Dieck, managing partner of Proeza Ventures.
“Improvements in ADAS capabilities will require new, scalable validation technologies that can help enable more reliable mobility,” said Abhijit Ganguly, managing director, Goodyear Ventures. “Ottometric is transforming ADAS validation and AV training, and the Goodyear team is excited to learn alongside a leading startup in this area.”
“The ADAS market is evolving rapidly due to government regulation and consumer demand for more reliable and capable driver assistance systems,” added Joseph Burke, CEO of Ottometric. “This funding enables us to grow the organization, expand our customer base and accelerate our transformation of the ADAS development and validation process for the next generation of driver assistance systems.”