IVEX Secures €5 Million Funding to Drive Advancements in AI-Powered Automotive Safety Testing

IVEX Raises €5 Million in Series A Funding to Expand Global Presence

IVEX, a DeepTech startup based in Heverlee, is on a mission to revolutionize automotive safety testing. The company recently secured €5 million in Series A funding to accelerate its engineering roadmap and extend its footprint in North America and Asia.

The funding round was supported by existing investors, The Faktory and Dedicated.lu, along with private investors. In conjunction with the funding, IVEX has bolstered its board of directors with industry experts such as Jan Leuridan, Omar Mohout, Simon Alexandre, and co-founder Quentin de Clercq, who now leads AI strategy at ASML in the United States, joining CEO Mario Torres on the board.

Mario Torres, co-founder and CEO of IVEX, stated, “Vehicle safety testing generates enormous amounts of data, but much of its analysis still depends on repetitive manual work. AI and rigorous mathematical algorithms allow us to make the testing process significantly faster and more scalable while keeping engineers in control and ensuring that every result remains traceable to the original data. With this funding, we can deepen the capabilities of our platform and bring IVEX technology to North America and Asia.”

Founded in 2018 as a spin-out from KU Leuven, IVEX specializes in providing technology for the analysis, validation, testing, and safety scoring of vehicles, with a particular focus on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) systems.

The company emphasizes that evaluating advanced automotive technologies like ADAS and AD necessitates reviewing large volumes of camera, sensor, and vehicle data. Traditional on-road tests required engineers to manually analyze footage, identify road signs, compare them with dashboard information, and ascertain if the vehicle responded correctly. IVEX was founded to address this challenge by leveraging computer vision, AI, and cloud-based data processing to automate the most time-consuming aspects of on-road vehicle safety testing.

IVEX’s platform can simultaneously interpret the car’s surroundings, capturing speed limits, reading road signs, and comparing multiple signals to assess if the vehicle recognized the relevant road information and responded appropriately.

The company operates with a human-in-the-loop model, allowing engineers to review the platform’s output and maintain control over the final assessment. IVEX’s technology significantly reduces the time engineers spend analyzing data, with one example citing the processing of 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data in just 8 hours of engineering time.

IVEX’s long-term vision is to develop the operating system for automotive safety testing, an AI-powered platform where various safety protocols, testing requirements, and vehicle functions can operate as applications. The platform’s underlying models continuously improve as IVEX processes data from additional vehicles and driving environments, creating a foundation for current and future automotive safety-testing applications.

With the new funding, IVEX plans to strengthen its presence in Europe and expand into key global automotive markets like North America and Asia. The company aims to introduce its AI-powered testing and data-processing technology to regulators, testing institutions, and automotive firms in these regions. Additionally, IVEX will enhance the range of NCAP protocols supported by its platform and build the necessary infrastructure to process larger data volumes across various countries, vehicle types, and testing environments.

IVEX is a trusted supplier to Euro NCAP, providing technology used in official vehicle assessments. The company’s platform has been deployed in on-road testing campaigns across more than 20 countries, including markets in the EU, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Japan. IVEX has amassed over 100,000 kilometers of driving data, collaborated with data from more than 50 vehicle models, holds six patents (including one in the United States), and is ISO 27001 certified.

In February 2023, IVEX secured its Seed funding round backed by PMV, SPDG, The Faktory Fund, Noshaq, and Dedicated.