Seed Funding Announcement
WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Ottometric, an emerging technology leader in the validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), has secured a total of $4.9 million in its seed funding round. The round was led by Rally Ventures, with participation from leading mobility funds including Goodyear Ventures, Proeza Ventures, Automotive Ventures, Trucks VC, Reinforced Ventures and Investor Collaborative.
Company Background and Expertise
Ottometric was founded in 2019 by a team of automotive industry veterans from companies like General Motors, Autoliv, NVIDIA, and Optimus Ride who have been instrumental in the evolution of ADAS over the past decade, and have a deep understanding of the artificial intelligence (AI) training and validation processes. Their unique expertise in automotive electronics, AI, computer vision, and big data analytics has enabled the company to develop a breakthrough cloud software platform that automates and streamlines the ADAS development and validation process. Ottometric’s initial customers are market leaders in the ADAS industry and include two of the top ten largest Tier-1 automotive suppliers in the world.
The Cost and Complexity of ADAS Validation
Automotive OEMs and their suppliers spend $ billions every year developing and testing ADAS systems to meet government regulations and improve driver safety and confidence. The development and validation process creates petabytes of data from a myriad of sensors that must be analyzed and validated before the start of vehicle production. Ottometric helps these companies save $ millions in development and validation costs while significantly reducing time to market versus traditional, painstaking manual annotation and review. Using the Ottometric platform customers can more easily find and fix bugs in ADAS software, enabling shorter development cycles, significant reduction in overall ADAS program costs, and improved system reliability. OEMs and their suppliers can now accelerate the deployment of next-generation ADAS systems to enhance their competitive advantage as well as demonstrate compliance with current and future government regulations.
Investor Perspectives
Zenas Hutcheson, Venture Partner at Rally Ventures, said “Ottometric offers unique, game-changing technology to automate ADAS testing and validation. Leveraging cloud computing, Ottometric automatically identifies critical events and anomalies that are essential for understanding real-world performance of ADAS solutions.”
Rodolfo Dieck, Managing Partner of Proeza Ventures, said “At a time when Tier-1s and OEMs are under pressure to improve the performance of their ADAS systems, Ottometric’s solution provides a step function improvement in validation efficiency and agility helping to reduce the time to production and avoid costly delays.”
“Improvements in ADAS capabilities will require new, scalable validation technologies that can help enable more reliable mobility,” said Abhijit Ganguly, Managing Director, Goodyear Ventures. “Ottometric is transforming ADAS validation and AV training, and the Goodyear team is excited to learn alongside a leading startup in this area.”
Looking Ahead
“The ADAS market is evolving rapidly due to government regulation and consumer demand for more reliable and capable driver assistance systems,” said Joseph Burke, CEO of Ottometric. “This funding enables us to grow the organization, expand our customer base, and accelerate our transformation of the ADAS development and validation process for the next generation of driver assistance systems.”
