On their way to fully autonomous vehicles, self-driving car manufacturers face a big task: train their AIs to be able to reliably respond to all the scenarios a car, truck or bus might encounter, as well as, hopefully, better. , than a human would. Today, a startup with a platform to help with this challenge is announcing a major funding round to advance these strategies.
Foretellix, which creates verification and validation solutions to test the full range of driver assistance and autonomous systems on the market, raised $42 million to close its Series C at $85 million. The round includes financial investors along with strategic backers from the automotive and chip industries, a signal of who is already working with Foretellix, as well as the largest business trajectory for the startup.
The full round is led by Israeli VC 83North, with Singapore’s Temasek and automaker Isuzu investing alongside Woven Capital (Toyota’s venture fund), Nvidia, Artofin and previous backers MoreTech, Nationwide, Volvo Group VC, Jump Capital, Next Gear Ventures and OurCrowd. The first close of this Series C was in May of this year at $43 million.
This brings the total raised by Foretellix to $135 million. He wouldn’t disclose the valuation, but co-founder and CEO Ziv Binyamini confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s above the previous figure, but “not crazy.”
The company’s client list includes some of the biggest names in the automotive industry. They include Volvo, Daimler, Isuzu, Toyota “and others that are not yet public,” Binyamini said.
At previous companies, including Intel and Cadence Design Systems, Binyamini and his co-founders, Gil Amid and Yoav Hollander developed and captured a wealth of knowledge around testing and computation as a means to explore performance and design across variations and permutations and uses , but specifically as it relates to chip design. It was about “finding problems before committing [manufacturing] silicon,” he said.
The way Binyamini sees it, scenarios in automotive and autonomous systems are another step on that trajectory, albeit a much more complex and vital one.
There is some artificial intelligence in the way Foretellix does its work, and its goal is partly to improve artificial intelligence systems, but really the crux of their discovery was to find the algorithms, the calculations needed to create of many scenarios (expressed in the form of data and images) to help train systems for what might come up and to make sure the systems know how to respond to them (and that they respond at all).
He describes the heart of the solution stack as the ability to “automatically generate scripts — an unlimited number of scripts — based on high-level specifications” in what is now the industry standard language. (Refers to ASAM OpenSCENARIO 2.0 [OSC2.0] standard development, which was developed in part by Foretellix itself to fit into the very fragmented and proprietary landscape of autonomous platforms and driver assistance systems.) “We create these scenarios to find the peaks in millions and millions of different situations,” he said . In addition to this, there is an important element of big data analytics, which analyzes test results to give customers deeper insights.
Part of the funding will go towards continued development of the platform – including introducing more productive AI to both power the platform and interact with it – as well as business development. There are about 180 employees in the company today and the plan is to add more.
There is a very obvious market segment in consumer engines, but equally the company makes solutions for a range of other vehicles, from trucks and buses to vehicles used in off-campus situations — for example, in industrial scenarios such as mining — where the full autonomy is already playing.
This also included contributing to other companies’ platforms in the simulation testing arena. Nvidia, for example, has built-in Foretellix tools on the Drive SIM driving simulation platform, used to test autonomous systems.
“Isuzu believes that safety verification and validation is essential for OEMs to responsibly develop safe autonomous vehicles,” Hiroshi Sato, Isuzu’s Vice President of Engineering, said in a statement. “Foretellix’s advanced technology in automated scalable scenario generation and its leadership in the OpenSCENARIO 2.0 standard are key advantages for Isuzu. Working with Foretellix’s senior management and engineers is a great opportunity and a significant asset to Isuzu’s autonomous vehicle development.”
