Participated · Series B · Dec 2021

Apex.AI builds Apex.OS, a scalable operating system and SDK that lets OEMs implement complex AI and autonomous driving functionality across vehicles and robots. Its platform is positioned as analogous to Apple’s iOS SDK for vehicle software, intended to shorten development cycles for customers. Apex.OS has earned high safety certifications, including TÜV Nord product certification and ISO 26262 ASIL‑D. The company has attracted strategic OEM partners and investors, including a partnership with Toyota’s Woven Planet. Apex.AI is based in Palo Alto, CA, and targets safety‑critical automotive applications. Financially, the company accrued over $56 million in Series B funding as of last December and continues to draw OEM investments. Apex.ai develops safety-certified software tooling for automakers and other mobility customers, notably an ISO 26262–certified software development kit called Apex.OS for autonomous driving and safety-critical applications. The company also offers Apex.middleware, an enterprise middleware product that integrates protocols to improve communication between software applications. Apex.ai was founded by Bosch veterans Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic and maintains offices in Palo Alto, Berlin, Stuttgart and Munich. The team recently secured TÜV NORD certification for Apex.OS at the highest ISO 26262 functional safety level, enabling use in production vehicles. Financially, Apex.ai has raised $74 million to date and plans to commercialize its existing products while developing new offerings for adjacent markets such as agriculture, mining, industrial automation and IoT. The company intends to double its workforce from about 70 to roughly 140 by the end of next year and to expand into Asia under the leadership of former Panasonic executive Tavis Szeto. Apex.AI is a Palo Alto-based startup founded by automated systems engineers Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic that is building a robotic operating system qualified for use in production automobiles. The company focuses on an enterprise-focused version of the Robot Operating System open-source middleware. It lists two products, Apex.OS — providing simple-to-integrate APIs to give automakers access to fully certified autonomous mobility technology — and Apex.Autonomy, which supplies specific autonomy components such as perception, localization and path planning. Apex.AI positions its technology to help speed the process of getting autonomous driving systems into production vehicles across commercial and consumer offerings by enabling easier development of safety-certified systems, per Volvo Group Venture Capital's comments. Last November the two-year-old startup raised $15.5 million in a Series A. Volvo Group Venture Capital has made an investment via Volvo's VC arm; financial details were not disclosed and Volvo said the investment "has no significant impact" on its earnings or financial position. Apex.AI develops an enterprise-grade operating system for autonomous vehicles designed to never fail. Its software stack is positioned as an enterprise version of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and is built to integrate into existing systems. The company has engineered redundancies and schedules compute to guarantee safety-critical processes receive required execution time. Apex.AI is application-agnostic and targets a range of autonomous mobility platforms, including cars, drones, and flying taxis. The founders emphasize moving beyond R&D toward mass production as autonomy scales. Financially, the company emerged from stealth while announcing a new financing round to support these efforts.

Participated · Series B · Nov 2021

actnano produces Advanced nanoGUARD™, a water- and environmental-resistant nanocoating applied to connectors, antennas, LEDs, and high heat‑generating components to protect electronics. Its scalable, turnkey solution integrates into existing manufacturing lines to enable broad adoption by electronics manufacturers. The company is positioned as a trusted partner to global automotive and consumer electronics OEMs and Tier‑1 suppliers, and ANG technology is already integrated into production vehicles and leading consumer devices. actnano emphasizes that its coatings are safe, non‑toxic, environmentally friendly, and outperform traditional conformal coatings. The company plans to use proceeds from the recent financing to expand its technical sales and services footprint and to increase production volumes and efficiencies to meet global demand. The articles note growing adoption across applications and industries, including sustainable energy use cases. Actnano develops surface protection technologies applied to connectors, antennas, LEDs, and high-heat generating components for automotive and consumer electronics. Its gel-state advanced nanoGUARD is used in smartphones, automobiles, home security systems and other consumer electronics. The company reports its technologies are protecting electronics on over 2 million production vehicles, including 80% of EVs in North America. Actnano emphasizes worker and environmental health and safety in its protection technologies. The company plans continued research and development to stay ahead of customers’ changing needs and ongoing global expansion into key automotive markets such as Germany, Korea and Japan. It is described as a global leader in surface protection technologies for automotive and consumer electronics. actnano commercializes Advanced nanoGUARD, a water- and environmental-resistant nanocoating technology for protecting electronics in automotive and consumer devices. Its coatings can be applied directly to connectors, antennas, LEDs and high-heat components and integrate into existing manufacturing lines as a scalable, turnkey solution. actnano’s nanoGUARD technologies are protecting electronics on over 2 million production vehicles, including 80% of EVs in North America, and are used in many leading consumer devices. The company describes its coatings as safe, non-toxic, environmentally friendly and higher performing than traditional alternatives in harsh conditions. actnano will use the new capital to expand its global sales and technical teams and to ramp up production to meet increased demand. Customers and partners include global automotive and consumer electronics OEMs and Tier‑1 suppliers. actnano commercializes Advanced nanoGuard™ (ANG), a wet nanocoating that can be applied directly to connectors, antennas, LEDs and high-heat components to provide water and environmental resistance. Its coatings are electrically insulating yet allow electrical connection through the coating, enabling protection of connections that previously had to remain uncoated. The ANG technology is sold as a scalable, turnkey solution that integrates into existing manufacturing lines and is already integrated into production vehicles and leading smartphones. actnano counts global automotive, electric vehicle and consumer electronics OEMs and Tier‑1 suppliers as customers and is expanding its automotive customer base with OEMs in Germany, Japan and Korea. The company emphasizes that its coatings are human-safe, non-toxic and environmentally sustainable compared with many incumbent technologies. Recently the company completed an oversubscribed $12M Series A to support its next phase of growth and market adoption.

Participated · Series B · May 2021

Oculii develops AI software that significantly improves the imaging performance of low-cost, commercially available radar sensors, claiming up to a 100-fold increase in spatial resolution. The company intends to scale via software licensing to radar companies rather than building automotive hardware, though it does manufacture sensors for robotics clients. Oculii works with multiple OEMs and has an existing commercial relationship with General Motors; the article notes another OEM is on the company's cap table. CEO Steven Hong says the software approach scales with data and gets cheaper over time relative to hardware. The startup recently closed a $55 million Series B and shortly afterward received an additional investment from GM. Those financings are positioned to support wider adoption of Oculii's radar-improvement tech across the automotive supply chain. Oculii builds a smart software layer for existing radar systems and also sells its own high-resolution radar units (Eagle and Falcon) that it says enable far greater spatial detail. The company claims its AI-driven, adaptive waveform approach can improve radar spatial resolution by up to 100x and leverages temporal integration to produce “4D” sensing. Oculii works with Tier‑1 suppliers and OEMs (one of which, HELLA, is also an investor) and has commercial contracts targeting 2024–2025 deployment. It competes with other novel radar approaches but emphasizes software-driven resolution improvements and hardware-software synergy. The firm intends to use the new funding to scale operations, hire, and continue investing in technology to deliver higher resolution, longer range, more compact and cheaper sensors. The article frames Oculii as positioning radar for a larger role in autonomous vehicle perception stacks.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2020

Drishti develops AI-based video analytics and video traceability for manual assembly lines, providing data and insights to improve manual production. The company focuses on extending human potential in increasingly automated manufacturing environments. Its platform delivers visibility and traceability of manual operations to drive improvements in critical business areas. Drishti said its technology can drive significant improvements for people working on the line and across organizations. The company’s mission emphasizes people and technology working in concert toward AI-powered production. Founders are Dr Prasad Akella, Dr Krishnendu Chaudhury and Dr Ashish Gupta. Drishti is a Palo Alto–based developer of motion recognition and AI technology that digitizes human actions inside factories. Its core product uses action recognition and AI to automatically capture and label human actions on production lines, creating a dataset to enable digital transformation for manufacturers. The technology is designed to permit productivity and quality improvements while helping line workers remain competitive against automation. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Prasad Akella, Dr. Krishnendu Chaudhury, and Dr. Ashish Gupta, the company is a spin-out from SRI International. Drishti is supported by a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. In October 2018 it raised $10M in a Series A led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Benhamou Global Ventures.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2018

BreezoMeter builds AI- and machine-learning-driven tools that forecast 40 pollutants across pollen, air pollution, wildfires and weather with street-level resolution (within 16.5 ft). The company aggregates data from more than 47,000 sensors, satellites, traffic and local sources to deliver hyperlocal air-quality and pollen insights in over 100 countries. Its data powers consumer integrations such as the Apple Weather app on iPhone and Apple Watch and is embedded in health devices like Propeller by Resmed. BreezoMeter reports about 300 million people use its platform daily, and Propeller’s incorporation of BreezoMeter data is associated with roughly 50% fewer asthma attacks for its patients. The startup plans to use the new funding to develop additional product categories and to grow its team to about 120 people. BreezoMeter is based in Israel and launched in June 2014; Ran Korber is CEO and co-founder. BreezoMeter delivers hyperlocal, real-time air quality and pollen information via APIs by combining governmental sensors, satellites, weather, transportation and other data sources. The company processes roughly 1.8 TB of data hourly and supplies customers in smart home, medical, automotive and lifestyle sectors. BreezoMeter has landed partnerships with companies such as Cisco and Faurecia and is used to support products in smart cities and mobility. The company plans to integrate low-cost sensor data using proprietary spatial interpolation algorithms to increase urban resolution to about 30 meters. Funding will also support expansion into European and Asian markets and deeper integrations such as HELLA Ventures’ AirShield in-cabin solution. BreezoMeter was founded in 2014 in Haifa, Israel, by Ran Korber, Ziv Lautman and Emil Fisher. BreezoMeter is a Haifa- and San Francisco-based global air quality analytics provider. Led by co-founder and CEO Ran Korber, the company provides accurate air quality data including pollutant concentrations and forecasts down to the city block. Its models derive data from governmental sensors, satellites, weather patterns, transportation dynamics and other sources. BreezoMeter offers its data as a service via API to enterprise customers across smart home, fitness, cosmetics, automotive and health-technology sectors. Customers include Dyson, Veolia, Cisco, Motorola Solutions, Current (Powered by GE) and Onboard Informatics. The company closed a $3M Series A in December 2016 and intends to use the funds to expand global coverage, enter additional markets and launch new products in 2017. BreezoMeter builds real-time, street-level air pollutant maps and delivers localized air-quality information as weather-health data to consumers and businesses. Its core product is an API plus mobile apps (Android and iOS) that present actionable air-quality metrics. The company works with municipalities and smart-city companies and has drawn interest from real estate firms. Executives highlight potential medical use cases, including providing air-quality data to doctors to inform patient care. In late June BreezoMeter raised $1.8M, which the company says may enable expansion into health and medical markets. The firm also promotes economic use cases, such as quantifying pollution impacts on housing prices to drive local decision-making.