Ride Vision, an Israeli startup that is building an AI-based safety system to prevent motorcycle collisions, announced today that it has raised a $ 7 million Series A round led by the crowdsourcing platform OurCrowd. YL Ventures, which typically specializes in cybersecurity startups but also led the company's $ 2.5 million seed round in 2018, Mobilion VC and motorcycle mirror maker Metagal participated in this round. The company has now raised a total of $ 10 million.
In addition to this new funding round, Ride Vision also announced today a new partnership with automotive parts manufacturer Continental .
"As motorcycle enthusiasts, we at Ride Vision are thrilled with the prospect of our international launch and our partnership with Continental," said Uri Lavi, CEO and co-founder of Ride Vision in today's announcement. "This moment is an important milestone as we move closer to our dream of enabling riders to feel truly safe while enjoying the ride."
The general idea here is pretty straightforward and comparable to your car's blind spot monitoring system. Using computer vision, the Ride Vision system, the Ride Vision 1, analyzes the traffic around a cyclist in real time. It provides forward collision warnings and monitors your blind spot, but can also tell you when you're following another driver or car too closely. It can also simply log your ride and will soon be able to make emergency calls on your behalf when things go wrong.
As the company claims, the number of motorcycles (and other motorized two-wheelers) only increased during the pandemic as people started avoiding public transportation and sought relatively affordable alternatives. In Europe, sales of two-wheelers increased by 30% during the pandemic.
The hardware of the bike itself is pretty basic. It includes two wide-angle cameras (one in the front and one in the rear), as well as warning indicators on the mirrors, as well as the main processing unit. Ride Vision has patents on its human-machine alarm interface and vision algorithms.
It is worth noting that there are already some blind spot monitoring solutions for motorcycles on the market, including those from Innovv and Senzar. Honda also has patents on similar technologies. These don't provide the kind of 360-degree view that Ride Vision is aiming for.
Ride Vision says its products will be available in Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Greece, Israel and the UK in early 2021, with the US, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Japan, India, China and others later.
