HAAS Alert raises $5 million in seed round to develop vehicle collision avoidance system

According to foreign media reports, HAAS Alert, a SaaS (software as a service) company that provides real-time car collision prevention information for public safety and road fleets, announced that it has raised $5 million in seed round financing, and will use the newly raised funds to expand its development and prioritize technology research and development with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) technology partners. The round of financing was led by R^2 and Blu Ventures, and TechNexus, Stacked Capital, Urban Us, Techstars, Ride Ventures and Gramercy Fund participated.

HAAS Alert dashboard hazard warning information (Image source: HAAS Alert)

HAAS Alert relies on cellular-based sensors to obtain road hazard data from the vehicle's surroundings and uses its predictive technology to issue digital alerts to drivers through the vehicle system. The company's proprietary digital alert system, Safety Cloud, is now used in a variety of public and private sector vehicles, including fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, tow trucks, construction and waste disposal trucks, school buses, etc. In addition, according to HAAS Alert, at least 8 automakers have pre-installed Safety Cloud on their fleets.

The company believes that both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and V2X technology are solutions, so it first focuses on the highest risk areas on the road and develops its services based on this. To date, Safety Cloud has been installed in more than 750 public and private agency vehicles and has sent more than 1 billion alerts in total.

HAAS Alert represents a growing number of startups that want to use V2X technology to reduce the risk of collisions, and financing is a major challenge. Not only does it cost money to build and update software, but the hardware and labor costs required to install sensors in public infrastructure and in cars are also high. HAAS Alert hopes to send 10 billion driver safety alerts by 2022, and to do this, it needs the support of the automotive industry. Currently, the company mainly works with fleets, but it says that the more vehicles on the platform, the more automotive industry customers it can attract.

HAAS Alert also said it is installing HA-5 Transponder hardware on vehicles across the U.S., which automatically sends digital alerts to approaching drivers when an emergency vehicle's flashing lights are activated. Such alerts can alert road users that emergency personnel are on the road or nearby, giving drivers time to slow down or speed up.

Agulnek, senior vice president of HAAS Alert Connected Vehicles, said that hardware setup is quick and easy, with minimal vehicle downtime, but vehicles can also integrate Safety Cloud without hardware through existing CAD, GPS or telematics systems. "Adding Safety Cloud to a vehicle only requires a software upgrade, which receives data through the vehicle's existing telematics technology and displays alerts to the driver on the infotainment system screen or instrument cluster. We are currently working on a project with an automaker that takes less than a week to complete the alert setup in the car."

Agulnek said the computation is done either in the cloud or on the chip edge within the hardware, meaning the alert logic resides in the HAAS Alert cloud, the vehicle OEM’s cloud, the vehicle head unit, or a hybrid multi-zone architecture.

Safety Cloud also comes standard with a fleet management platform, the Situational Awareness Dashboard, designed to enable cross-jurisdictional coordination agencies to work together. HAAS Alert also includes add-ons for specific industries. For example, the Responder-to-Responder (R2R) feature is equipped with a set of in-vehicle lights that send notifications to emergency personnel when other vehicles equipped with Safety Cloud are in active emergency mode and approach the same intersection. FleetFusion enables customers to integrate Safety Cloud's real-time data into internal dashboards, third-party applications, and traffic management centers.