Obvio Raises $22 Million to Deliver AI-Powered Traffic Safety and Prevent Traffic Deaths

Obvio, which improves traffic safety with an AI-powered traffic camera solution, today announced $22 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Additional investors include Khosla Ventures and Pathlight Ventures. With these funds, Obvio will expand nationally and grow the team.

Traffic fatalities have accelerated over the last few years to become a national crisis. Each day in America, more than 100 people are killed in traffic accidents - more fatalities per mile driven than most high-income nations. This is the equivalent of a commercial airplane crashing daily, but we don’t have to accept these fatalities as an inevitability.

Despite more than $35 billion of government funding spent in recent years, traffic fatalities are still higher than pre-pandemic levels. This is because existing approaches – education, engineering and limited enforcement – are grossly inadequate. Engineering projects like road diets and roundabouts cost millions of dollars and take years to complete. Education campaigns about traffic laws don’t elicit meaningful change. Amid an ongoing police staffing shortage, there are not enough resources to allocate toward traffic enforcement to squash the most dangerous behaviors on the roadways: phone-scrolling while driving, failure to stop at stop signs, and not yielding to pedestrians.

Obvio brings a new, holistic solution to traffic safety, giving municipalities and law enforcement the tools needed to change driver behavior and create a new culture of safety on the roadways. Obvio deploys solar-powered AI cameras to 1) detect a wide range of dangerous driving behavior; 2) create visibility for community members; and 3) enable law enforcement to automatically send citations to the most egregious violators.

“Obvio was built to provide real accountability to drivers and avoid so many preventable injuries and fatalities,” said Ali Rehan, co-founder and CEO. “I see the need for change first hand. Every day I walk my daughter to school and see drivers blowing through stop signs. Even the crossing guards say they feel scared trying to keep children out of harm’s way.”

In Prince George’s County, Maryland, after two children were struck and killed near a school, Obvio partnered with local leaders to launch a first-of-its-kind stop sign camera program. Obvio measured thousands of drivers running stop signs during pick-up and drop-off hours and began sharing statistics with communities at portals like letsdrivesafer.com/morningside. The county used Obvio’s program to issue tickets, which reduced stop sign running by 50% within eight weeks.

“Even if I had 30 more officers, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish what we did with Obvio,” said Dan Franklin, police chief of Morningside, Maryland, which is in Prince George’s County. “We are moving closer to our 100% stop sign compliance goal - this has made both my residents and elected officials very happy.”

Existing traffic safety technology has not been updated in more than 25 years. Obvio presents the opportunity to apply cutting-edge technology to address a national crisis, while keeping safety and privacy top of mind. Obvio’s intelligent cameras only collect necessary information and have privacy intelligence on each device. For example, footage that is not a traffic violation is automatically blurred or deleted and only critical information is shared with municipalities and law enforcement.

Co-founders Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari met at Motive, where they built AI camera technology to help more than 200,000 commercial fleet drivers drive more safely. Ali, a second-time founder, incubated Motive’s industry-leading safety dashcam business, with Dhruv joining Motive from Google’s Augmented Reality team. After recognizing that Motive technology helped truck drivers reduce crashes, they are now applying those learnings and technology to public safety.

Obvio aims to usher in a new paradigm of how cameras should be thoughtfully used in society. Its cameras can transform how governments and communities understand their own roadways. The company is doing so by solving technical challenges across computer vision, hardware design and operations, while having a positive impact on residents and municipalities.

“We were impressed to see the thoughtfulness by which the founders, Ali and Dhruv, were approaching communities: focusing on both safety and privacy,” said Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “It was this, combined with product velocity and customer obsession, which has led to steep growth and insane levels of customer and market pull.”

About Obvio

Obvio improves traffic safety by providing AI-powered traffic cameras. Obvio is on a mission to prevent traffic deaths while rebuilding public trust and a sense of shared responsibility on the roads. With Obvio, cities have reduced traffic violations by over 50 percent. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company is backed by leading investors such as Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Pathlight Ventures. To learn more, visit https://www.obvio.ai.

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