The summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cyvl.ai co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job. He returned home and worked for the local public works department, where he discovered there was little software for tracking road repairs. He was told to go out and drive the car, find the problem and solve it.
“I was filling holes, fixing signs, cutting down trees. And while I was there, I quickly saw that they didn't have any data.” Pelaez told TechCrunch. He saw an opportunity to become Cyvl.ai, a company that helps local governments and civil engineering companies deploy a digital layer to track the health of their transportation infrastructure.
Today, the Boston-area startup announced a $6 million investment.
“Our core vision, and the reason we founded the company in the first place, is to help the whole world build and maintain better transportation infrastructure,” he said. This includes roads, highways, sidewalks, airports, and railways. Anyone who lives in Boston definitely knows that this is an area where the city needs a lot of help.
What they're doing is using sensors that can create digital twins of pieces of infrastructure, such as roads, to show where weaknesses are and predict when remediation events are likely to occur. . They do this using LiDAR, cameras and sensors, which they combine with proprietary data analytics and geospatial AI pipelines, he said.
“What we're providing end users, whether they're civil engineering companies or governments, is better data about transportation systems that they've never been able to capture before, and we're providing them with much better data on transportation systems than they could ever capture before, and we're providing them with much better data on transportation systems than they could ever capture before, whether they're civil engineering companies or governments. We’re just helping them become truly data-driven when it comes to building and maintaining systems — large-scale transportation systems,” Pelaez said.
He admits that selling to governments is not for the faint of heart, but the startup has found a way around the problems that come with doing business with municipalities. They learned that outside civil engineering companies were often responsible for conducting road surveys (or other transportation reviews) on behalf of cities and towns, so they began partnering in a channel-like relationship. .
“In many cases, we just rely on them to tell governments all the benefits of this technology and show them that they used to collect data manually. We're going to use it to deliver better data, better.'' You can get better visuals for the same cost, if not cheaper than what's already proposed in the contract. ” he said.
This approach has so far seen nearly 200 cities and towns using the software and nearly $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just two and a half years of operation. So partnering with these companies appears to be paying dividends. He said the main competition so far has been resistance to changing from manual to digital processes, rather than other companies doing similar work.
The company has an office in Somerville, Massachusetts, outside Boston, and currently has 11 employees, but is currently hiring, and hopes to have 20 by the end of this year. As the son of immigrants who came to the United States from Colombia with nothing and was able to graduate from college while working, he especially recognized the need to build a diverse group of employees and the value of hard work. I'm telling you that. .
The $6 million investment was led by Company Ventures, with participation from Argon Ventures, AeroX Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Existing investors MassVentures, Launch Capital, and RiverPark Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of $10 million.