Cartica AI Secures its Series B Investment Round Led by Global Automotive Giants

Cartica AI, a leading Israeli autonomous AI mobility startup today announced the completion of its Series B investment round, which includes participation from Continental, Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, and OurCrowd for an undisclosed sum. The funds will be used to launch its Autonomous AI platform and scale its global operations with a focus on increasing the safety of cars and lowering casualties on the global motorways.

“We’re excited to have these leading funds and strategic players on board, said Cartica AI Co-founder & CEO Igal Raichelgauz. “Our goal is to introduce a novel, yet proven, AI approach to the automotive industry, which will pave the way for a safer and more autonomous transportation. Our strategy is to build strong partnerships with leading automotive players in order to bring our solution to the high-volume automotive marketplace by the end of next year. Joining forces with these leading players is another substantial validation of our unique technology and business strategy.”

Cartica AI introduces a paradigm-shift to the conventional AI approach of supervised deep learning, which is heavily based on massive amounts of human-labeled data. This labeling process is time-consuming, expensive and unreliable for edge-case scenarios. In contrast to deep-learning, Cartica AI enables unsupervised learning from real-world data, resulting in unprecedented accuracy in edge cases and challenging scenarios. Cartica AI’s platform is based on an already mature technology, following over a decade of R&D, and is protected by over 200 patents.

As the automotive industry is transitioning towards enhanced autonomy, incorporating new AI capabilities, such as the ability to predict road behavior and better understand the scene’s contextual elements, Cartica AI is providing these next generation AI capabilities to the industry, while using affordable computational resources of an average car.

“Cartica pursues an entirely novel approach to autonomous perception and enables a wide range of compelling use cases that have the potential to transform mobility solutions in automotive and beyond,” said Nils Berkemeyer, Venture Capital Manager at Continental. “We look forward to joining Cartica on its promising journey and are excited to support Igal and his passionate team with this strong syndicate of mobility investors.”

“Cartica AI introduces a series of important technological advancements for an OEM ranging from low compute requirements and low energy consumption, to a transparent decision-making process of the computer vision-based perception stack.  Updates to the system can be included within minutes without the need to re-run vast amounts of training data like neural network-based approaches,” said Kasper Sage, Partner BMW i Ventures.  “This is of immense value before a new system release. We believe Cartica will thus play a key role in the development of Autonomous Driving and Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) by OEMs and Tier 1s, allowing them to design safe and predictable solutions that fulfill the strict requirements of the market.”

“We’re thrilled to invest in Cartica AI. It’s rare to see a company leverage over a decade of computer vision research and development applied to the toughest problems in autonomous driving,” said Toyota AI Ventures Founding Managing Director Jim Adler. “We’ve been impressed with the quality of Cartica’s team and their unsupervised learning approach to new perception solutions for the automotive market. We look forward to working with them as they power the next generation of mobility AI solutions.”

“OurCrowd is very excited to be investing in Cartica,” said OurCrowd Senior Investment Partner Eli Nir. “Cartica AI has a unique mix of a world class technology, team, extremely strong IP portfolio, and a product that offers functional and cost benefits that are currently unheard of in the ADAS ecosystem, not to mention robust market traction that can convert into very sizeable deals. We are pleased to be able to help CEO Igal Raichelgauz, his team and other stake holders in the company to maximize the potential of Cartica.”