Israeli startup Waycare cuts crashes, eyes expansion

There is no end in sight to a yearslong debate over the method of communication that automakers might someday use to alert motorists of potential hazards on the road.

While the auto industry and federal government have been preoccupied and paralyzed by arguments over whether dedicated short-range communications or cellular are the better means to send those messages, Israeli startup firm Waycare is concerning itself with the messages themselves.

"Everyone is focused on how we communicate, and very few are looking at what we communicate," said Noam Maital, CEO of the company, which uses its connected mobility platform to synthesize real-time information from public-sector traffic management centers, private partners such as Waze and vehicles themselves.

"I was asked a question about whether it'd be DSRC or cellular, and I said, 'I don't understand the question,' " he said. "America is the land of options. You have 17 salad dressings at the grocery store. It might be that it's both, and maybe it's a third option that interoperates with everything."

Waycare, founded in 2016, aims to be one of those options. Its initial pilot projects are showing present-day results in helping transportation departments analyze real-time and near real-time traffic information to help motorists avert crashes. In Las Vegas, a partnership between the city's regional traffic center and the company resulted in a 17 percent reduction in primary crashes on a portion of the Interstate 15 corridor.

Now the company is expanding its efforts. Similar projects with the Florida Department of Transportation and Central Ohio Transit Authority in Columbus are underway. A $7.5 million Series A funding round completed last week is expected to drive expansion into five to 10 more U.S. states by the end of 2020, according to Maital. Cities in Israel and Europe also are slated to use Waycare's software, starting next year.

At a time when self-driving vehicles are often perceived as the most substantial long-term means to curtail the 40,000 or so deaths that occur every year on American roads, Waycare — one of the standouts at the EcoMotion conference in Tel Aviv in June — offers evidence that plenty can be done in the meantime to reduce the carnage until that far-off future arrives.

Using its cloud-based platform, the company gathers real-time data from its partners and vehicle fleets and runs deep-learning algorithms on the information to identify existing problems and make predictive inferences about locations where problems and crashes are most likely to develop.

Those inferences emerge from stitching together information on hard-braking events and evasive maneuvers detected in single vehicles to broader information on traffic slowdowns identified from video feeds to more contextual information on weather conditions and nearby sporting events.

Law enforcement agencies and traffic-management departments can use Waycare's platform to respond to immediate problems. Tina Quigley, then general manager of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said the agency identified crashes as much as 12 minutes faster using the platform.

They can also make decisions on where to deploy resources to prevent further collisions.

One aspect of what Waycare offers is that it's not merely another potential means of communicating time-sensitive information on traffic conditions and hazards, but it's a way of doing so without an overhaul of public infrastructure. It could serve as an alternate that diminishes the need to replace aging sensors already embedded in or along roads. In the future, it could eliminate the need for the infrastructure investments required to make safety messages transmitted via DSRC or cellular networks tenable.

"We're building a new model for agencies that doesn't require them to rely on expensive and new infrastructure to support the new technology," Maital said. "When you use vehicles themselves as sensors, you have new speed and a new baseline for how you manage a transportation network. And you do that at a fraction of the cost of upgrading your infrastructure, and you are able to keep up on the technology as it evolves at a rapid pace."

Motorists can also directly benefit from Waycare's information and inferences. Waycare relies on Waze for certain information. It also feeds its real-time information back to app users.

For now, though, the company's primary focus is working with public-sector transportation agencies, helping them reduce collisions now and gear up for a future that perhaps involves more management of connected and autonomous vehicles.

"Today, it's a one-way street of communication, where traffic management decides whether a light is red, and you, as a driver, see that and press the brakes," Maital said. "What we're moving toward is a vehicle that's a virtual sensor that shares information, syncs with existing data, and then AI makes decisions and shares those directly back to the vehicle.

"As we go along, we're building a layer that enables transportation agencies to usher in mobility technology."