The summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kyvl.i Co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job. He went home and worked at his local public works department, where he noted there was very little software to track road repairs. He was told to get out, drive, find problems and fix them.
“I was filling potholes, making signs and cutting trees. And during my time there, I quickly saw firsthand that they had no data for anything,” Pelaez told TechCrunch. He saw an opportunity that would eventually become Cyvl.ai, a company that helps municipalities and civil engineering firms bring a digital layer to monitoring the conditions of transportation infrastructure.
Today the Boston-area startup announced a $6 million investment.
“Our core vision and the reason we started the company is to help the entire world build and maintain better transportation infrastructure,” he said. This covers roads, highways, pavements, airports and railways. Anyone from Boston surely knows that this is an area where the city could use a lot of help.
They use sensors that can create a digital twin of the piece of infrastructure, such as a road, and then show where weaknesses exist and predict when a repair event is likely to occur. They do this using lidar, cameras and sensors, and combine it with their own data analysis and geospatial artificial intelligence, he said.
“What we’re providing our end users, whether they’re civil engineering firms or governments, is better data about their transportation systems than they could have ever imagined, and we’re just helping them be data-driven when it comes to building and the maintenance of these very large-scale transportation systems,” Pelaez said.
He admits that selling to governments is not for the faint of heart, but the startup has found a way to overcome the issues associated with dealing with municipalities. They learned that outside civil engineering firms are often responsible for conducting road surveys (or other transportation reviews) on behalf of the city or town and have begun working with them in a kind of channel relationship.
“Often, we really rely on them to communicate to the government all the benefits of this technology, showing them that they were collecting it manually before, and we’re going to use this new technology to give them better data and better data and better visuals with the same cost, if not cheaper than what was already proposed in the contract,” he said.
The approach seems to be working with nearly 200 cities and towns using their software to this point in just 2.5 years of operation, generating nearly $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). So partnerships with these companies seem to be paying dividends. He says the main competition so far has not been other companies doing something similar, but resistance to changing from manual processes to digital.
The company has an office in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, and currently has 11 employees, but is hiring and hopes to have 20 by the end of this year. He says that as the son of an immigrant who came to the U.S. from Colombia with nothing, and as someone who was able to put himself through college, he is acutely aware of the need to create a diverse group of workers and the value of hard work.
The $6 million investment was made by Companyon Ventures with participation from Argon Ventures, AeroX Ventures and Alumni Ventures. Existing investors MassVentures, Launch Capital and RiverPark Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of $10 million.
