Cyvl.ai is bringing data-driven solutions to transportation infrastructure
Summary
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.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. 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 were providing our end users, whether its 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.Oftentimes, were really just relying on them to communicate to the government all the benefits of this technology, showing them that they were collecting it manually before, and were going to use this new technology to give them better data better and better visuals at the same cost, if not cheaper than what was already proposed in the contract, he said.The approach seems to be working with close to 200 cities and towns using their software to this point in just 2.5 years of operation, generating close to $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Existing investors MassVentures, Launch Capital and RiverPark Ventures also participated in the round.