Revolutionizing traffic management with AI

Insight
July 14, 2021

Our new investment in NoTraffic: Revolutionizing traffic management

Cities around the world grapple with major traffic challenges – logjam, congestion, accidents, and health-damaging emissions. Autonomous vehicles have started to operate in some areas, which require more sophisticated management systems in the mid-term. To tackle these issues and developments, Tal Kreisler, Uriel Katz, and Or Sela founded NoTraffic, which has developed a real-time, plug-and-play autonomous traffic management platform, that uses AI to reinvent how cities run their transportation networks.

Vektor Partners is excited to lead NoTraffic’s Series A investment round alongside Nielsen Ventures. Early-stage venture capital investment firm Grove Ventures, insurance firms Menora Mivtachim Group and Meitav Dash, as well as existing investors including lool ventures, Next Gear Ventures and North First Ventures also participated. With the new funding, the NoTraffic team will accelerate the roll-out of its platform in North America, expand to additional markets in Europe and Asia, and further invest in the company’s product portfolio and R&D to extend its technological lead. VEKTOR Partners is proud to support the NoTraffic Team on their growth journey.

At Vektor Partners, we have been part of NoTraffic’s journey since early 2020. A continuous dialogue allowed us to get to know the team well, participate in the strategic thought process around commercialization, and to observe the firm’s evolving strategy and early customer wins in parallel to developments in the sector. The team has reached its ambitious technological milestones and developed strong customer traction. In field test results in California and Phoenix, Arizona, NoTraffic has demonstrated its system’s ability to achieve a 50% reduction in wait times, which in an average city would be equivalent to a cut of 26k tons of emissions and freeing up 388 years of motorists’ time stuck in traffic jams every year.

The desire to create traffic management systems started with the introduction of the first set of traffic lights. The challenge was always to create systems that dynamically adjust to traffic patterns in a wider grid in real-time, and systems that can be deployed without significant infrastructure investment. A century after the first electric traffic intersection was introduced (Ohio, 1914), 99% of intersections in the US still operate on fixed timing plans, and 75% of intersections are not connected to any networking. What distinguishes NoTraffic’s solution is how it applies a combination of different technologies, including edge processing, V2X communication, cloud data integration, and a proprietary artificial intelligence engine, to tackle the difficulties of managing traffic beyond merely ‘corridors’. The computational challenge of taking into consideration the exponential complexity of cross-traffic and the knock-on effects of decisions throughout the network is immense. NoTraffic’s system can be easily retrofitted on any existing intersection infrastructure in under two hours, without the need to remove or replace any infrastructure or the need for additional investments or physical connections. More importantly, however, NoTraffic’s platform is more than just another traffic management system – it is a platform that municipalities can use to implement traffic-related policies, ranging from the prioritization of emergency vehicles or public transport, to the ability to devise strategies based on environmental or economic goals. The system can identify, track, and categorize vehicles, while it collects data on an anonymized basis to protect privacy. We believe that NoTraffic is well placed to become a successful disruptor in the traffic management sector.

About Vektor Partners

We back visionary and globally minded founders of scalable B2B businesses operating at the technological frontier of AI-enabled applications, computer vision, software-definability, and next-gen compute power, with a strong focus on economic resilience, as well as defense and security applications.  The firm's most recent fund is dedicated to opportunities in the transportation, logistics, and supply chain space - a sector that is an early adopter of new technologies.  We are early-stage investors, and our ‘home’ are Seed to Series A rounds with initial investments typically in the range of €1-5m.  We mainly invest in Europe in globally oriented founders who we support with our deep network and partners across Europe, the US, and the MENA region.

About NoTraffic

NoTraffic develops a technology that brings traffic light interchanges to the 21st century. The company’s real-time, plug-and-play autonomous traffic management platform uses AI to reinvent how cities run their transport networks, by identifying, categorizing, and tracking all road users - including passenger and non-passenger vehicles, bikes, e-scooters, buses, and pedestrians. The system combines all-weather sensors installed at intersections with a 24/7 network operation center (NOC) that augments the sensors’ information with integrated data collected from vehicles and infrastructure. The system is able to accurately predict arrival times at an intersection and accordingly streamline the timing of the traffic light system autonomously in order to maximize the flow of traffic - reducing congestion, prioritizing different types of vehicles and preventing accidents. NoTraffic was founded in 2017 by Tal Kreisler, Uriel Katz and Or Sela.

Partner since
2021

HQ
Tel Aviv, Israel

Status
Portfolio

NoTraffic