Foretellix raises the bar on safer vehicle testing
By Matthew Kalman
OurCrowd mobility pioneer Foretellix is on a mission to improve the testing of self-driving vehicles.
“One of the biggest challenges of a self-driving vehicle is that one can’t be sure if it is safe or has been tested enough,” Deepangshu Dev Sarmah reports in an interview with the startup’s founders for Mobility Outlook.
Foretellix aims to enable and improve “measurable safety” of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles, while ensuring the autonomous vehicles perform properly under all possible driving conditions, Sarmah says.
The company’s marquee global customers include Volvo, Denso, Nvidia, Valeo, Mobileye, Nio, AWS and IPG Automotive. In January, it announced a multi-year strategic collaboration with Torc Robotics, a subsidiary of Daimler Truck. Its partnership with Volvo Autonomous solution aims to jointly create a coverage-driven verification solution for autonomous driving that operates on public roads and restricted areas.
Earlier this month, Foretellix announced it raised $43 million from investors including Toyota and Nvidia in a first close of its Series C round led by 83North. That brought total raised capital to over $93 million.
Other major investors include Jump Capital, Volvo Group Venture Capital, Nationwide Insurance and MoreTech Ventures. 83North is leading a current Series C round.
Foretellix says it will use the funding to accelerate development of its expanding product portfolio and fuel expansion across new geographies.
Verification and validation of safety is the major barrier to large-scale commercial deployment of automated driving systems. With autonomous driving technology developers making new software fixes daily, there is no way to physically test the various scenarios that can play out on a road.
“Our job is to challenge software of the self-driving car and see whether it reacts correctly or not”
Its simulation solutions – which can virtually test millions of driving scenarios required to ensure the safe deployment of fully autonomous vehicles – allow that kind of scale.
“Our job is to challenge software of the self-driving car and see whether it reacts correctly or not,” says Co-founder Gil Amid. The current level of testing is insufficient, he adds.
The Foretellix platform is used during the development and certification phases of the vehicle. It is not a software that sits in the vehicle while it is in operation.
The company’s Foretify platform continuously measures and analyzes test results and helps development teams uncover bugs earlier in the development cycle. That dramatically cuts development costs while boosting development teams’ productivity, improving time to market and safety.
The Tel Aviv-based company’s three co-founders had decades of experience designing verification and validations for microchips. They founded Foretellix in 2018 after concluding that experience could be applied to autonomous cars.
The utilization of hyper-automation, big data analytics and artificial intelligence consequently figure centrally in the platform.
Foretellix provides its solutions to OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers around the world. It is currently integrating into vehicles its Level 4 autonomous technology, which allows for self-driving in most conditions and environments.
A report this year by ResearchAndMarkets.com projects that the global self-driving cars market will triple to 62.4 million units by 2030, with mounting demand for safety and driving assistance systems likely to drive the growth of the self-driving cars market.
Rising investment in the development of cars with higher levels of autonomy will propel the market, the report says.
Strategic Market Research recently reported that the worldwide autonomous car market’s value will soar to $197 billion in 2030 from $25 billion in 2021. Factors such as the rise in the development of smart cities and adoption of advanced technologies in vehicles are powering the surge, it says.
Foretellix is now funding on the OurCrowd platform.
