Israeli startup VAYAVISION raises $8 million for its autonomous vehicle perception system

Tel Aviv-based startup VAYAVISION that works on raw data fusion and perception systems for self-driving vehicles has landed an $8 million funding round led by Viola Ventures, Mizmaa Ventures, and OurCrowd with strategic investment from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and LG Electronics. The company is planning to use the capital injection for marketing efforts and focus on building partnerships across the world.

VAYAVISION specialises in combining the environment data received by the self-driving car from different sources — such as LiDAR, radar, and camera — to create a comprehensive model of what's going on around the vehicle. The approach is supposedly superior to what used to be done by the car manufacturers before.

“Most current generation autonomous driving solutions are based on ‘Object Fusion’ architecture, in which each sensor registers an independent object, and then must reconcile which data is correct,” said Youval Nehmadi, CTO and co-founder of VAYAVISION. “This provides inaccurate detections and results in a high rate of false alarms. The industry has recognized that to reach the required levels of safety, more advanced perception paradigms are needed – such as raw data fusion.”