IVEX, a Heverlee-based DeepTech startup developing technology for automotive safety testing, has raised €5 million in Series A to accelerate its engineering roadmap and expand its presence in North America and Asia.
The round was backed by existing investors, The Faktory and Dedicated.lu, as well as private investors. Alongside the funding round, IVEX has strengthened its board of directors with Jan Leuridan, former CEO of Siemens Industry Software NV; Omar Mohout, Director at Deloitte; Simon Alexandre, Partner at The Faktory; and IVEX co-founder Quentin de Clercq, who now leads AI strategy at ASML in the United States. They join IVEX co-founder and CEO Mario Torres on the board.
Torres, co-founder and CEO of IVEX, said, “Vehicle safety testing generates enormous amounts of data, but much of its analysis still depends on repetitive manual work. 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.”
Founded in 2018 as a spin-out from KU Leuven, IVEX is on a mission to help companies to create the safest vehicles on earth. The company provides technology for the analysis, validation, testing, and safety scoring of vehicles, with a focus on evaluating Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) systems.
According to the company, assessing increasingly sophisticated automotive technologies such as driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems (AD) requires testing organisations and manufacturers to review large volumes of camera, sensor and vehicle data.
It notes that in on-road tests, engineers have traditionally had to examine footage, identify road signs and conditions, compare them with dashboard information and determine whether the vehicle responded correctly. It opines that such manual analysis cannot scale without a proportional increase in engineering work.
IVEX claims that it was founded to address this problem. Its platform uses computer vision, AI and cloud-based data processing to automate the most time-consuming parts of on-road vehicle safety testing.
It further states that the technology can simultaneously interpret the car’s surroundings, capturing, for example, speed limits and other signs, reading the vehicle’s displays to the driver, and automatically comparing multiple signals.
IVEX says that the resulting analysis helps determine key information, such as whether the vehicle recognised the relevant road information and responded as required by the applicable safety protocol.
The company also highlighted that it operates with a human-in-the-loop model, allowing engineers to review the platform’s output and retain control over the final assessment. It argues that IVEX’s technology can reduce the time engineers spend analysing data by more than 95%. It reported one example wherein the platform processed 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data in only 8 hours of engineering time.
The Belgian startup’s long-term goal is to build the operating system for automotive safety testing: an AI-powered platform on which various safety protocols, testing requirements, and vehicle functions can run as applications.
It highlighted that the platform’s underlying models improve as IVEX processes data from additional vehicles and driving environments. This creates a continuously expanding foundation for current and future automotive safety-testing applications.
The company plans to use this capital to build on its position in Europe and to establish a stronger presence in other major global automotive markets, including North America and Asia. It also intends to bring its AI-powered testing and data-processing technology to regulators, testing institutions and automotive companies operating in these regions.
IVEX will also continue expanding the range of NCAP protocols supported by its platform and strengthening the underlying infrastructure required to process larger volumes of data across additional countries, vehicle types and testing environments.
The company is a trusted supplier to Euro NCAP, providing technology used in official vehicle assessments. Its platform has also been deployed in on-road testing campaigns across more than 20 countries, including markets throughout the EU, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Japan.
The startup has accumulated more than 100,000 kilometres of driving data and worked with data from more than 50 vehicle models. IVEX holds six patents, including one in the United States, and is ISO 27001 certified. In February 2023, the company raised its Seed funding round backed by PMV, SPDG, The Faktory Fund, Noshaq, and Dedicated.
Source: EU-Startups
