VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York

Round 39,000 individuals had been killed in motorized vehicle incidents within the USA in 2020 — and 6,200 of these deaths had been pedestrians. Evidently, these deaths aren’t simply statistics: every has a ripple impact on households, family members and the broader communities. Viva is trying to deal with transportation impacts after elevating $8.5 million in funding to increase its transport knowledge assortment into North America, with the long-term hope to scale back the variety of accidents and make site visitors safer total. 

Viva (or VivaCity as it’s identified within the U.Okay.) is already well-established in Australia and the U.Okay. and is now bringing its synthetic intelligence sensors to New York Metropolis. It can work with the New York Metropolis Division of Transportation (NYC DoT) on a brand new security knowledge evaluation mission. Viva’s sensors collect anonymized knowledge displaying how totally different road customers transfer (or don’t) via town. They will monitor what number of autos or individuals are touring during which path, the place and when congestion happens and even detect “close to misses” between autos or autos and pedestrians.

This wealth of anonymized knowledge is meant to help NYC DoT in making strategic choices that assist individuals transfer from A to B extra effectively, extra sustainably and extra safely. The speculation is that should you can predict the place accidents are prone to happen, taking motion to stop them beats ready for one — or extra — to occur earlier than attempting to do one thing about it. 

“There’s a vital want for expertise that adapts to the altering mobility panorama. Reactive decision-making will not be match for goal and it’s costing lives. To alter, we have to have knowledge to higher perceive how individuals are utilizing the roads,” Viva’s CEO Mark Nicholson explains. “This helps authorities to redirect their billions of annual infrastructure funding into the proper locations.”

“The principle driver for each myself and my co-founders is to deal with local weather change. It’s the unhappy fact that globally, transport is essentially the most cussed in the case of emissions — even with electrical autos coming in,” says Nicholson. In a nutshell, poor transport infrastructure is a people-killer in additional methods than one. “Making our streets safer means extra individuals can go locations on foot or by two-wheeled pedal-power. Good for individuals, good for the planet.” 

“I’m excited to see the influence this may have on highway security, significantly for weak highway customers like cyclists. The notion that the roads are harmful is the No. 1 purpose that individuals don’t cycle extra, so something we are able to do to vary that may have an enormous local weather influence,” says Nicholson.

Nicholson and his co-founders met at college in 2011, once they raised half one million {dollars} to construct an experimental automobile that was 50x extra environment friendly than customary highway autos. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, they based Viva in 2015, trying to enhance highway security and struggle local weather collapse.

Since its basis, Viva has deployed greater than 3,500 sensors in seven nations. These sensors can detect 9 totally different modes of transport and have gathered a formidable 20 billion highway person counts. Its newest funding goals to assist it develop additional.

Viva’s newest funding is led by sustainable infrastructure VC investor EnBW New Ventures (ENV), sustainability-led different property and SME funding supervisor Foresight Group and Gresham House Ventures, the expansion fairness arm of specialist different asset supervisor Gresham Home. Utilizing this fundraising, Viva says it’s targeted on continued development, with two explicit targets: 

First is its inner growth, of which the New York Metropolis collaboration is a component. “We’re already current in over 100 U.Okay. cities and have labored with authorities in Australia and round Europe to higher perceive their roads,” says Nicholson. “With our sensors put in in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, NYC DoT are actually analyzing this knowledge to prioritize tasks for the areas most in want of security and different enhancements.”

The second objective is to increase the Viva product line.  “Our imaginative and prescient is for highway transport infrastructure to develop into data-driven, together with real-time methods like site visitors alerts. The brand new product portfolio has focused merchandise that handle the three main challenges the trade faces: highway security, sustainable transport and community optimization to beat congestion,” Nicholson concludes. 

Nicholson is in little doubt of how helpful the info collected by Viva might be to creating livable cities. “If we glance again 10-20 years, different industries have been revolutionized by knowledge, together with promoting, advertising and retail. These industries are actually radically totally different due to knowledge that has gone into their ecosystems.”

VivaCity’s sensors are privacy-forward and comparatively unobtrusive. Picture Credit: VivaCity

The collation of large-scale anonymized knowledge will permit for the evaluation of how a metropolis’s roads perform: how and when individuals transfer about, and the place the bottlenecks and blackspots are. Finally, this will result in safer streets and livable cities the place residents aren’t afraid to have interaction with energetic journey. 

You might need seen how there’s an emphasis on “anonymized knowledge” right here — the corporate tells TechCrunch that privacy-by-design is key to the corporate, and it claims that sustaining the safety and confidentiality of individuals’s knowledge is vital to the corporate’s success.

“I imagine strongly that the way forward for the Sensible Metropolis needs to be citizen-centric,” says Nicholson. “As such, we’ve designed our options from the bottom as much as assure the privateness of each citizen. The system was developed utilizing knowledge protection-by-design ideas and is absolutely compliant with GDPR.”