Self-Driving Car Startup Raises $85M to Produce Automaker Tech

An Israeli start-up producing tech that assists automakers in improving their self-driving cars has announced significant new funding.

Tel Aviv-based Foretellix has emerged as a leading provider of Verification and Validation (V&V) solutions for Automated Driving Systems (ADS) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).

And its growing influence has been underlined by the closure of a series C round of funding at $85 million, bringing its total raised capital to date to $135 million.

The round was led by venture capital firm 83North and saw Japanese commercial vehicle specialist Isuzu and Singapore investment firm Temasek join previous investors, including Nvidia, Woven (the growth fund of auto manufacturing giant Toyota) and the Volvo Group.

The investment will be used to further develop Foretellix’s product portfolio and accelerate its global expansion.

Foretellix’s V&V platform has been created to enhance the safety of ADS and ADAS tech, as well as reduce development costs and cut the time it takes to bring to market. Known as Foretify, it is claimed to “bridge the gap between real-world testing and virtual simulation” by using AI to analyze driving logs compiled during road tests.

This allows it to generate millions of scenarios and safety checks in virtual simulation to uncover so-called edge cases – extreme situations that happen very rarely – and bugs early and efficiently.

This helps to address one of the major hurdles facing automakers developing self-driving tech – how to train an AV to be able to react better than a human in any scenario, no matter how unlikely when humans have spontaneous thinking to fall back on.

Foretify facilitates extracting anomalous scenarios from all the data collected, making it possible to retest them in virtual simulation, leveraging the accuracy of the original real-world source and allowing exploration of additional variations. 

It’s an approach that has already found favor with several companies involved in the autonomous automotive, trucking and mining sectors across the world. Volvo, Toyota, Isuzu and Daimler – via its subsidiary Torc Robotics – are, unsurprisingly, all customers.

“We are thrilled to have Temasek and Isuzu join as investors,” said Ziv Binyamini, Foretellix CEO and co-founder. “Foretellix is driving a transformative leap forward in V&V technology and methodology. 

“Our solutions address the largest barriers to safe large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles while dramatically reducing development costs. This funding round will secure our long-term sustained growth. It will help extend our product line for real-world and synthetic driving scenarios and the development of new AI capabilities."

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