In the summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cyvl.ai co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job. He went home and worked at his local public works department, where he noted that there was very little software for tracking transportation infrastructure repairs. He was told to go out, drive around, find issues and fix them.
From an article in Tech Crunch by Rob Miller.
“I was filling in potholes, fixing signs and cutting down trees. And during my time there, I quickly saw firsthand they had no data on anything,” Pelaez told TechCrunch. He saw an opportunity that would eventually become Cyvl.ai, a firm that helps municipalities and civil engineering firms bring a digital layer to tracking the conditions of transportation infrastructure.
Today the Boston-area startup announced a $6 million investment.
“Our core vision and why we started the company in the first place is to help the entire world build and maintain better transportation infrastructure,” he said. This covers roads, highways, sidewalks, airports and rail. Anyone from Boston certainly knows this is an area where the city could use a lot of help.
They are using sensors that can create a digital twin of the infrastructure piece such as a road, and then showing where there are weaknesses and predicting when there is likely to be a repair event. They do this using lidar, cameras and sensors, and combine this with their own data analytics and geospatial AI pipeline, he said.
“What we’re providing our end users, whether it’s civil engineering firms or governments, is better data on their transportation systems than they could ever have captured before and just helping them really be data driven when it comes to building and maintaining these very large-scale transportation systems,” Pelaez said.
He admits that selling to governments is not for the faint of heart, but the startup has figured out a way around the issues involved in dealing with municipalities. They learned that external civil engineering firms are often responsible for doing road surveys (or other transportation reviews) on behalf of the city or town, and they have begun partnering with them in a channel kind of relationship.
For the complete article CLICK HERE.
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