Autobrains, an Israel-based developer of autonomous driving technology, received $101m yesterday in a series C round featuring carmakers BMW and VinFast as well as automotive component producers Continental and Knorr-Bremse.
The round was led by Singaporean state-owned investment firm Temasek while Herzog Fox & Neeman served as legal adviser to Autobrains for the transaction.
Founded in 2019 as Cartica AI, Autobrains has developed technology that maps raw real-world data to compressed signatures and identifies concepts and scenarios for optimal decision-making.
The process results in a single representation of space and advanced perception, an understanding of the contextual elements of driving scenarios and a reduction of reliance on labelled data and computing power. Autobrains intends to use the funding to boost international expansion.
The company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of series B funding in September 2019 from Continental; Toyota AI Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of carmaker Toyota; BMW i Ventures, the strategic investment arm of BMW; and equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.
Autobrains is an offshoot of artificial intelligence technology developer Cortica, a Technion spinout co-founded in 2007 by former postdoctoral researcher Igal Raichelgauz, who is also Autobrains CEO.
Raichelgauz said: “By reducing the need for manually labelled training data that feed systems which miss or misinterpret the most challenging scenarios, our technology is more agile and on a steeper trajectory than our competitors’ systems.
“With this latest round of funding, we are excited to grow our commercial reach and bring self-learning AI to additional markets.”