American streets are incredibly dangerous for pedestrians. A San Carlos, California-based startup called Obvio thinks it may possibly change that by installing cameras at stop signs — an answer the founders also say won’t create a panopticon.
That’s a daring claim at a time when other corporations like Flock have been criticized for a way its license plate-reading cameras have develop into a crucial tool in an overreaching surveillance state.
Obvio founders Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari consider they’ll construct a sufficiently big business without indulging those worst impulses. They’ve designed the product with surveillance and data-sharing limitations to make sure they’ll follow through with that claim.
They’ve found deep pockets willing to consider them, too. The corporate has just accomplished a $22 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Obvio plans to make use of those funds to expand beyond the primary five cities where it’s currently operating in Maryland.
Rehan and Maheshwari met while working at Motive, an organization that makes dashboard cameras for the trucking industry. While there, Maheshwari told TechCrunch the pair realized “plenty of other normal passenger vehicles are awful drivers.”
The founders said they were stunned the more they looked into road safety. Not only were streets and crosswalks getting more dangerous for pedestrians, but of their eyes, the U.S. was also falling behind on enforcement.
“Most other countries are literally pretty good at this,” Maheshwari said. “They’ve speed camera technology. They’ve a superb culture of driving safety. The U.S. is definitely considered one of the worst across all the fashionable nations.”
Maheshwari and Rehan began studying up on road safety by reading books and attending conferences. They found that individuals within the industry gravitated toward three general solutions: education, engineering, and enforcement.
Of their eyes, those approaches were often too separated from one another. It’s hard to quantify the impact of educational efforts. Local officials may attempt to fix a problematic intersection by, say, installing a roundabout, but that may take years of labor and tens of millions of dollars. And law enforcement can’t camp out at every stop sign.
Rehan and Maheshwari saw promise in combining them.
The result’s a pylon (often brightly-colored) topped with a solar-powered camera that could be installed near almost any intersection. It’s designed to not mix in — a part of the education and awareness aspect — and it’s also fastidiously engineered to be low cost and simple to put in.
The on-device AI is trained to identify the worst varieties of stop sign or other infractions. (The corporate also claims on its website it may possibly catch speeding, crosswalk violations, illegal turns, unsafe lane changes, and even distracted driving.) When considered one of these items occur, the system matches a automotive’s license plate to the state’s DMV database.
All of that information — the accuracy of the violation, the license plate — is verified by either Obvio staff or contractors before it’s sent to law enforcement, which then has to review the infractions before issuing a citation.
Obvio gives the tech to municipalities without cost and makes money from the citations. Exactly how that citation revenue will get split between Obvio and the governments will vary from place to put, as Maheshwari said regulations about such agreements differ by state.
That clearly creates an incentive for increasing the variety of citations. But Rehan and Maheshwari said they’ll construct a business around stopping the worst offenses across a large swath of American cities. Additionally they said they need Obvio to stay present in — and conscious of — the communities that use their tech.
“Automated enforcement needs to be used along with community advocacy and community support, it shouldn’t be this camera that you just put up that does revenue grab[s] and gotchas,” Maheshwari said. The goal is to “start using these cameras in a method to warn and deter probably the most egregious drivers [so] you possibly can actually create communitywide support and behavior change.”
Cities and their residents “have to trust us,” Maheshwari said.
There’s also a technological explanation for why Obvio’s cameras may not develop into an overpowered surveillance tool for law enforcement beyond their intended use.
Obvio’s camera pylon records and processes its footage locally. It’s only when a violation is spotted that the footage leaves the device. Otherwise, all other footage of vehicles and pedestrians passing through a given intersection stays on the device for about 12 hours before it gets deleted. (The footage can also be technically owned by the municipalities, which have distant access.)
This doesn’t eliminate the prospect that law enforcement will use the footage to surveil residents in other ways. However it does reduce that likelihood.
That focus is what drove Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal to take a position in Obvio.
“Yes, within the short term, you possibly can maximize profits, and erode those values, but I believe over time, it would limit the flexibility of this company to be ubiquitous. It’ll create enemies or create individuals who don’t want this,” he told TechCrunch. “Great founders are willing to sacrifice entire lines of business, frankly, and plenty of revenue, in pursuit of the final word mission.”
