Nexar, an AI mobility company that is crowdsourcing vision sensor data from vehicles on the road to feed a variety of services and road safety capabilities, has agreed to acquire Veniam, a Portuguese software firm with wireless mesh technology for connecting vehicles to one another and to the internet.
Vehicles on the road increasingly are being compared to computers or even data centers, but key to this acquisition is the notion of vehicles increasingly becoming data engines. Israel-based Nexar provides vision sensing through dash-cams that can capture crowdsourced, anonymized data “from billions of miles of driving” with the aim of creating a “digital twin of America’s roads and cities,” the company said in a statement.
Many data applications are already powered by this digital twin, including applications helping to train autonomous cars for extreme driving scenarios, map out the changing road infrastructure, monitor, in real time, locations of construction zones and available street parking, identify roads in need of repair, and many more.
With this deal, Nexar will be able to pair its technology with Veniam's communications technology at the edge, which ‘turns the cars themselves into internet access points for other devices, creating a mesh network capable of sharing data and internet connectivity across hundreds of thousands of devices and cars,” the statement said.
Doing so will help the companies extend the reach of what they can accomplish and decrease the costs of rich mobility applications and the real time mapping of the physical world.
“Veniam is a natural fit for Nexar,” said Eran Shir, co-founder and CEO of Nexar. ”We became very familiar with their technology, and the amazing team behind it, as clients of Veniam. It was obvious that we can achieve so much more with them as part of Nexar. With Veniam we will continue scaling our data footprint, and be able to expand our offering to OEMs. For the first time ever, Nexar will provide a bundle of rich applications and data access, removing long-standing barriers and accelerating the adoption of crowdsourced vision for the benefit of the entire mobility ecosystem.”
“Nexar is collecting and deploying data in a manner and scale that is unprecedented,” said João Barros, founder and CEO of Veniam, who will now serve as Chief Platform Officer at Nexar. “We’re thrilled to be joining their team and working together to transfer massive amounts of data to the cloud in a secure and cost-effective way, while making cars and the cities they drive in, smarter, safer and more sustainable.”