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A collective of micromobile companies are using a surprising new technology to fix what cities hate the most – sidewalk riding. Some companies, like Bird, Neuron and Superpedestrian, rely on GPS systems to detect if a rider is riding inappropriately. Others, like Lime, are starting to integrate camera-based computer vision systems that rely on AI and machine learning to know exactly where the driver is.
The latter camp relies heavily on Drover, a Los Angeles-based startup that has sold its attachable IoT module to the likes of Spin, Voy, Helbiz, Beam and Fenix to help operators improve scooter safety. Importantly, win the city permit.
Drover, founded in May 2020, closed a $5.4 million Series A round Wednesday. The startup will continue to build on the next-generation PathPilot, Drover’s IoT module that analyzes camera and visual data and provides commands to the scooter. Depending on the city’s needs, the scooters will either beep to warn you that they are driving on a sidewalk or slow down. The new version, PazPilot Lite, does a lot more, except it’s more integrated, better and cheaper, says Drover founder and chief business officer Alex Nesic.
Drover has modules on more than 5,000 vehicles, with more than 15,000 more on order for the company by the end of the year, Nesic said.
Bringing those next-gen modules to production will help expand Drover across the pond by hiring a few more minds in things engineering and project management, as well as government relations and communications in Europe.
Nesic said Drover is looking to hire a software engineer to build dashboards that the company will provide to micromobility partners.
A beta dashboard in front of a Drover operator that breaks down trips by infrastructure used. Image Credits: Driver AI
“We have a beta dashboard that shows what trips look like broken down by infrastructure, how much time each vehicle spends on each segment, and a color-coded version of what it looks like across the entire fleet,” Nesic told TechCrunch. “For any of your vehicles in the city, we have a parking confirmation dashboard where you can see where the trip ended, what our AI scored with a photo of the parking task. So we are making all these devices build themselves based on the information we are providing to our operator customers but they don’t have the bandwidth so these customer facing devices are an added value.
Drover sells the data to cities and is exploring using distributed cameras that move around cities to build a variety of tools that could provide city-wide dashboards that show information such as infrastructure conditions or bike lane violations. Nessick’s “Pet Project”
“Our system can tell you, for example, that the driver was on the bike lane 20% of the time, on the sidewalk 30% of the time, and the rest on the road,” Nesic said. “That informs a lot of policy decisions about where to put bike lanes or whether the bike lanes you’ve invested in are working.”
Drover is receiving interest from transport agencies such as Transport for London, as well as insurance companies looking for this kind of qualitative data to learn how new mobility methods are being used in infrastructure.
Some say the future of micromobility lies in owned vehicles, not shared ones. If that’s the case, it makes sense that shared micromobility will set the trend for future personal scooters to live up to. Advanced driver assistance systems are becoming table stakes for operators looking to conquer cities, and Nesic thinks private vehicle policy may soon follow — in fact, he hopes it will.
“Part of the money we’ve raised is to explore the supply chain with vehicle manufacturers and IoT manufacturers,” says Nesic. “The real goal is to keep the cost down, and if we can, our technology already has the computing power to be the next-gen IoT feature set, and then we’re licensing the Drover AI that’s equipped to handle it. Various infrastructure around the world.
But this is down the line. In the short term, Drover has focused heavily on expanding the back of shared scooter companies that are still hearing demand for this type of technology from cities.
Drover’s Series A was led by Vector Partners, a VC firm in the future of mobility. The company recently raised €125 million in funding for sustainable mobility, which is where Drover’s latest revenue came from.
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