Back in June, 1776 put out a call for its latest challenge: The Smart Highways Challenge, from the group and Transurban North America.
The program brings together six startups focused on improving the roads and networks Transurban manages. Together, they'll participate in the three-month incubator where they'll work with Transurban to improve their products and their own startups.
The Smart Highways Challenge is a part of 1776's new emerging model to work with established companies in a specific industry to craft an incubator program around it. Before working with Transurban, 1776 created a new program focused on travel tech with Marriott and Accenture. The partner company pays somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000 for 1776 to come in and run the program that is hosted at a 1776 campus — with different factors, such as duration and geographic reach, impacting the price.
Recently, 1776 and Transurban unveiled the six startups participating in the Smart Highways Challenge at 1776's Crystal City campus. Below is a list, with descriptions pulled from the press release announcement.
- Anatrope (HQ: Herndon, Va.): "Passively, remotely, and uniquely identifies a vehicle without any hardware being added to the CAN bus or to the vehicle itself."
- Brisk Strategies (HQ: Waterloo, Ontario): "Detects near misses on the road to predict future collision rates using computer vision."
- Mogol, Inc. (HQ: Portland, Oregon): "Connects city and Department of Transportation traffic managers directly to vehicles so that they can actively manage traffic and see the response in real time."
- NoTraffic (HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel): "Smart traffic management solution that allows agencies to improve their traffic in a seamless and cost-effective way."
- REVMAX (HQ: Brooklyn, NY): "Builds demand forecasting tools for vehicle fleets to improve transit efficiency."
- Valerann (HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel): "Enables roads to sense the traffic environment, report to control centers, communicate with drivers and support autonomous vehicles — for free."
