An artificial intelligence software startup that aims to reduce road hazards is expanding its footprint in Chicago.
Nexar, the Tel Aviv-based company which uses smartphones and dash cameras to reduce driving accidents, is looking to expand its reach in Chicago, starting with a full rebate for the first 500 users who purchase its dashboard cameras for $79. The expansion is part of the company’s long-term goal of increasing its existing user base, starting with the top 20 U.S. metro areas.
Nexar wants to expand in Chicago because the company felt it was “mature” enough to take on an area with a higher density like Chicago in comparison to the Manhattan borough of New York, said Nexar’s co-founder and CEO Eran Shir. The company operates primarily in Manhattan, though it has some users in other boroughs of the city, Shir added.
The company operates in 160 countries and has plans to increase its reach in other cities like Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C., Boston and Philadelphia. As of July 6, Illinois has had 447 fatal crashes, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.
“We have users today in 700 cities all over the world—probably more than that—but there are a handful in each city,” Shir said. “That’s why we have this strategy of going city by city and building density in each one.”
Using Nexar’s app and dashboard cameras, drivers can receive warnings about potential traffic collisions, automatically record collisions and receive other valuable aggregated driving such as traffic light change times or upcoming highway collisions—information which the company hopes will reduce traffic accidents and fatalities.
Nexar also provides anonymized, open-source data to researchers interested in artificial intelligence and transportation. Most recently, the company released 36,000 Nexar videos to the University of California-Berkeley’s Berkeley DeepDrive team, which researches artificial intelligence applications for automobiles. Shir said the company does not share identifiable user data and allows users to delete their data.
Shir said the company also works with insurance companies to easily collect collision information, improve its claims process and decrease fraudulent claims. According to Nexar’s website, New York drivers who use its cameras and software are eligible for 10 percent discounts on their Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC)-required insurance coverage.
The company’s website boasts a 30 percent reduction in collisions among its New York users. As the startup set out to do when it was founded in 2015, Nexar wants to gain enough critical mass, not just to gain users for the company’s sake but rather to aggregate an adequate data to warn drivers of potential dangers on the road, Shir said.
“A decade ago, Nexar was not possible… the smartphone platform was not strong enough. The sensors, the cameras were not cheap enough,” Shir said. “We thought that we have a way to scaling the solution that would actually make an impact.”
