Nexar, a leading AI mobility firm, said today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Veniam, the leading intelligent networking solution for the internet of moving things. Nexar will integrate vision data recorded and processed from billions of kilometers of driving with Veniam’s communications technologies through this acquisition. Together, the companies will dramatically expand the reach of rich mobility apps and real-time physical environment mapping while reducing costs.
Vehicles are becoming increasingly data-generating engines, and Nexar is at the forefront of data collection. Nexar’s popular dash cams collect crowdsourced photos and detections that are processed to generate and continuously update a digital twin of America’s roads and cities in real time. Numerous data applications are already powered by this digital twin, including applications that help train autonomous vehicles for extreme driving scenarios, map out the evolving road infrastructure, monitor the locations of construction zones and available street parking in real time, and identify roads in need of repair.
Veniam, headquartered in Porto, Portugal, has provided dozens of worldwide corporations with a software platform that enables components in automobiles to connect to each other and the Internet. The technology of Veniam transforms automobiles into Internet access points for other devices, thereby establishing a mesh network capable of exchanging data and Internet connectivity among hundreds of thousands of automobiles and other devices.
“Veniam is a natural fit for Nexar,” said Eran Shir, co-founder and CEO of Nexar. “We became very familiar with their technology, and the amazing team behind it, as clients of Veniam. It was obvious that we can achieve so much more with them as part of Nexar. With Veniam we will continue scaling our data footprint, and be able to expand our offering to OEMs. For the first time ever, Nexar will provide a bundle of rich applications and data access, removing long-standing barriers and accelerating the adoption of crowdsourced vision for the benefit of the entire mobility ecosystem.”
“Nexar is collecting and deploying data in a manner and scale that is unprecedented,” said João Barros, founder and CEO of Veniam, who will now serve as Chief Platform Officer at Nexar. “We’re thrilled to be joining their team and working together to transfer massive amounts of data to the cloud in a secure and cost-effective way, while making cars and the cities they drive in, smarter, safer and more sustainable.”
The acquisition is one of the first of a Portuguese firm by an Israeli corporation and symbolizes a turning point for the Portugal tech landscape, which has attracted international recognition as a startup hotspot in Europe.