Woven Capital, Nvidia Back Foretellix’s Autonomous Vehicle Verification Tech

Image Credits: Foretellix

Startups working entirely on driverless cars can’t attract the nine-figure acquisitions or funding that was prevalent a few years ago. But there are still pockets of strategic investor interest and investment within the broader automated vehicle technology sector.

“We’re looking for solutions that can be integrated into our own tool stack,” Betty Bryant, principal of Toyota Growth Fund at Woven Capital, told TechCrunch. No,” he said.

One of these companies, in which Woven has made a strategic investment, is Fortelix, an Israeli startup that provides tools for other companies to validate autonomous vehicle technology at any level. Bryant said this capability is important for safety assurance, so companies can commercialize everything from Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to Level 4 autonomous technology.

(According to the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Level 2 systems automate two main functions—maintaining speed and distance on the highway and keeping the vehicle in a lane—and still have a human driver at all times. Level 4 systems mean that the vehicle does all of the driving. It means that it can handle situations without human intervention under certain conditions.)

Woven Capital, along with Nvidia and Atrofin VC, participated in the initial closing of Fortelix’s $43 million Series C, led by 83North.

Foretelix CEO Zvi Binyamini said the company will use the funds to continue investing in the deep technology needed to ensure autonomy and hire sales teams that will help the company expand across multiple geographies. Foretellix already has around 150 employees spread across Israel, California, Detroit, Germany, Sweden, China and Japan.

“Demand is growing exponentially, so we need to scale it up,” Binyamini told TechCrunch.

At a high level, Foretellix’s offerings can be boiled down to two core technologies: scenario generation and big data analysis.

Every company that develops autonomous vehicle technology tests their systems by simulating different scenarios. Foretelix’s technology automatically generates “unlimited variations of scenarios” that companies can use, Binyamini said.

“We also complement that library of what we call core technology content,” he said. “Library of Scenarios, Library of KPIs. So if you’re building ADAS, we have a library for every problem, like automatic emergency braking, for example. For each such function, we have a library of all relevant conditions and associated KPIs or metrics.

After a company tests the system on simulated scenarios or physically on real roads, they need to analyze the results, which is Foretellix’s second core technology.

Some of Fortelix’s biggest customers include Daimler Trucks and Volvo Group, both of which are developing autonomous trucks. The company works closely with Nvidia to integrate it with the Drive SIM platform, Nvidia’s end-to-end simulation platform. Last September, Nvidia announced that DriveSim had acquired a new set of AI tools to test and develop self-driving vehicles.

“Nvidia is an infrastructure provider for the entire economy, from the hardware to the software to the simulator to the entire software stack,” Binyamini said. “Our solution is complementary to their offering because ultimately you need to validate it to build a fully autonomous system. Commercial and large-scale deployment is one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest, remaining challenges to achieving autonomy.”

Similarly, Bryant Woven at Toyota (formerly One Planet) is partnering with Foretelix as the startup’s solution complements Woven’s technology in-house. The mobility technology division is working on both ADAS and L4 technology, Bryant says.

“Foretellix has found an interesting niche in the simulation space,” Bryant said. “Foretellix is ​​not a simulation company, but it supports simulation. And I realize that other players are trying to work on building strong authentication technology, but no one has the technological focus and depth that Fortelix does.