Israeli smart dash-cam company Nexar today announced the completion of a $53 million Series D financing round led by Qumra Capital with the participation of State Farm Ventures, Catalyst Investments, Banca Generali, Valor and previous investors including Atreides Management, Corner Ventures, Regah Ventures, and Aleph. Qumra Capital managing partner Erez Shachar is joining Nexar's board. The company has raised $153 million to date.
Using AI computer vision technology, Nexar provides crowd-sourced visual data. With its data from hundreds of thousands of dash cams across the US and globally, Nexar says it is second only to Tesla with the volume of image-data collected. The footage is contextualized with AI and provides valuable insights to cities, departments of transportation, automotive and insurance companies, and more..
Nexar uses the footage collected to create an AI-digital twin of US roads and their surroundings. This dynamic representation provides real-time updates in a range of key areas such as work zones, road signs, road markings, potholes & many other elements, for a constant stream of accurate information. With this tool, city officials are able to plan, prioritize and fix issues at a much faster pace, while automotive companies are able to inform their autonomous vehicles of obstacles lying ahead.
Nexar’s cofounder and CEO Eran Shir said, "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 low-cost 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. "
Qumra Capital managing partner Erez Shachar, who is joining Nexar's board, added, "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."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 17, 2021.
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