Vivacity Labs has raised £1.6m in funding from Downing Ventures, the London Co-Investment Fund and Tracsis.
The startup, which is working on developing an AI camera to eventually facilitate the regulation of traffic in real-time and seeking to pave the way for driverless cars, also received a £.17m project grant from Innovate UK.
As part of its VivaMK project, London-based Vivacity Labs will deploy 2,500 of its sensors across a 50 square mile radius in Milton Keynes, in an attempt to monitor all major junction points and car parking spaces.
Yang Lu, chief technology officer at Vivacity Labs, commented on the news: “There is very limited intelligence to the current management of urban roads. Traffic lights are sequenced but rarely reactive to the levels of traffic around them.
“Traffic monitoring is still done manually. By introducing AI into the camera itself, Vivacity Labs has created a system that accurately identifies and reports road usage, removing the need for cumbersome manual interpretation and significantly reducing the potential for human error.”
The news comes after chancellor Philip Hammond announced a £270m investment fund for ‘disruptive technologies’ including driverless cars as part of his Spring Budget.