Nexar Raises $53 mln to Improve Driving Safety By Making Cars Smarter

Nexar, an AI-powered computer vision startup based in Tel Aviv, has raised $53 million in Series D funding to digitize American roads using dashcam images and improve safety in the process.

The funding round was led by Qumra Capital, with participation from firms like State Farm Ventures, Catalyst Investments, Banca Generali, Valor, Atreides Management, Corner Ventures, Regah Ventures, and Aleph. The cash infusion brings the total funding raised by the startup to more than $140 million. Erez Shachar, Managing Partner at Qumra Capital, referred to the round by stating:

“We were excited by Nexar’s vision to digitize the physical world and were impressed with the great strides it took in the past couple of years turning this vision into reality. We can’t wait to see how Nexar’s unique data network impacts the way all of us interact with and traverse the world around us.”

Nexar was founded with the mission of improving driving safety by helping government and private organizations to better understand the road system and make the necessary adjustments. The startup is doing this by crowd-sourcing visual data from thousands of dashcams across the United States, using AI to analyze it and create a digital representation with real-time updates. Eran Shir, Nexar’s Co-founder and CEO, said about this mission:

“When founding Nexar, my partner Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz came to the counter-intuitive understanding that the only viable path to truly turning the physical world digital, lies in a crowdsourced vision network that makes sense of the reality around us. In the last five years, we have worked to make that vision a reality by leveraging cheap hardware and sophisticated AI to create a world previously only available through expensive and complex hardware sensors such as LIDAR. In the past year, this effort has come to fruition, paving a path to a truly scalable live mapping of the world we live in. This funding round allows us to further grow this vision to help drivers drive safer and help cities turn digital. ”

Good traffic management is an essential aspect when it comes to preventing road traffic accidents, reducing transit times, reducing costs, reducing noise pollution, and diminishing negative environmental impacts. By providing actionable insights to those with the power to improve traffic management on a large scale, Nexar could save millions of dollars in costs to citizens, companies, and the government alike, all while making the roads a safer place.