Israeli startup NoTraffic has secured US$3.2m in seed funding that will be used to further develop its Internet of Things-based (IoT) traffic management platform, accelerate roll-outs in the USA, and grow the team both in Israel and the USA.
NoTraffic’s IoT traffic management platform is powered by image processing sensors and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication, enabling cities to make roads safer and optimize traffic flow in real time. The company’s latest funding round was led by Lool Ventures with participation from Next Gear Ventures, North First Ventures, and private investors Tal Recanati and Uri Rubin. The company has developed an advanced IoT platform for traffic management in urban environments, based on the integration of information collected through communication between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I) and information from smart sensors (using computer vision) deployed at traffic light-controlled intersections and conflict points on the road. The system is based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that identify, categorize and track all road users, from cars, buses and trams to cyclists, electric scooters and pedestrians, accurately predicting their time of arrival at an intersection.
Though the system is able to communicate with connected vehicles, in today’s world where the vast majority of vehicles are neither connected nor autonomous, NoTraffic sensors use computer vision to identify vehicles and pedestrians in real time. Depending on the information gathered, the system streamlines the timing of the traffic lights to maximize traffic flow and reduce loads, prioritize different types of vehicles and prevent accidents. The announcement of this funding round follows recent live pilots in California and a controlled trial earlier this year in the city of Ashdod, Israel, in collaboration with Foresight Autonomous Holdings, an innovator in automotive vision systems and Cellular-based Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) solutions. The experiment demonstrated the advantages inherent in communication between road infrastructure and vehicles, providing pre-collision alerts in real time to both pedestrians and vehicles outside of their own line of sight.
“This funding round was possible through the momentum we’ve achieved and provides us with a tailwind for the global activity which we are promoting today. Our system is already live in a number of locations in California as part of a series of pilots, and in the coming months it will be deployed in several other states across the USA,” noted Tal Kreisler, CEO of NoTraffic. “Where autonomous vehicle trials are on the increase, smart road infrastructure is still in its infancy. According to the US Department of Transportation, 99% of intersections in the USA are not adaptive in real time. We offer breakthrough technology to existing road infrastructure that has not changed for years. By processing large amounts of data in real time, we’ve been able to deliver monumental improvements in both cost structure and optimization of traffic management for cities.”
