On August 3rd, 2022, the Israeli Tech company Nexar, which is currently the largest collector of vision data from vehicles in the US, announced the acquisition of Veniam, a Portugal-based company created under the scope of the CMU Portugal Program by pioneering technology researchers João Barros, former CMU Portugal National Director and Susana Sargento, CMU Portugal Scientific director. Over the last decade, the startup became a leading provider of intelligent networking for the internet of moving things led by João Barros as CEO, who will now assume the role of Nexar’s chief platform officer.
With an IP portfolio of 150+ patents, Veniam’s Intelligent Networking platform enables connected cars and autonomous vehicles to move massive amounts of data between vehicles and the cloud, at a fraction of the cost, using advanced simulation software. The company has developed a technology stack that allows the effective utilization of multiple connectivity channels such as cellular, Wifi, Mesh and others, by moving vehicles. It allows to seamless uploads of massive amounts of data from vehicles, as they move, in real time, and with a much lower cost than just traditional cellular.
Veniam is Nexar’s first acquisition and represents, according to its Co-founder and CEO, Eran Shir a major “step for the future of Nexar and for the future of the mobility industry’s data stack.” With half a million vehicles worldwide, and hundreds of millions of miles per month in the US alone, Nexar is collecting today Petabytes of imagery and detections about the changing world, which are used to map the roads, monitor infrastructure, and alert vehicles in real time.
In Nexar’s official announcement the company shared that “this acquisition represents one of the first times that an Israeli company acquires a Portuguese tech startup, thus becoming a milestone for the innovation ecosystem in Portugal which attracts increasing international attention as an important European startup hub.“
This merger will now allow, according to Nexar, to offer Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEMs) and mobility players a bundled platform that will allow for the accelerated adoption of crowdsourced vision applications.
