Israeli smart car engine company Cognata Ltd. today announced that it had raised by $5 million in a financing round led by Emerge, Maniv Mobility, and Airbus Ventures. The Rehovot based company said that it had also launched its simulation engine,
The company will use the funding to accelerate product development and commercialization of its new solution, which combines artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision in a simulation platform. The platform enables autonomous vehicle developers to shave years off the long, costly process of road-testing autonomous vehicles.
Rand Corp. estimates that autonomous vehicles will need to drive 10 billion miles in order to reach a human-level error rate - and that can take years to achieve. Even the largest developers of autonomous vehicles have only accumulated a few million miles in autonomous driving after years of testing.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Danny Atsmon, a deep-learning expert who formerly served as Harman’s (NYSE:HAR now Samsung) director of ADAS and senior director of machine learning, Cognata provides a realistic virtual automotive environment that simulates real-world test driving and generates fast, highly accurate results. The simulation engine reproduces sensor input in high fidelity by emulating interactions with real-world materials. Cognata can also recreate cities anywhere in the world, allowing a dramatically expanded range of testing scenarios beyond the current limited geographies, to the great benefit of any OEM and Tier-1 autonomous vehicle manufacturer.
Atsmon said, "Every autonomous vehicle developer faces the same challeng - it is really hard to generate the numerous edge cases and the wide variety of real-world environments. Our simulation platform rapidly pumps out large volumes of rich training data to fuel these algorithms. We’re excited to introduce a scalable, safe, and cost-effective solution that not only accelerates the development and validation of autonomous vehicles, but also ensures that vehicles can be much safer when they’re deployed in the real world."
Dovi Ollech, founder and managing partner of Emerge, who led the round, notes that "Danny and the Cognata team have shown rapid progress and achievements since their founding. Their deep expertise in deep learning and broad knowledge of the automotive ecosystem helped them develop an extremely innovative solution for one of the major pain points of this industry."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 8, 2017
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