StradVision Closes Series C Funding for Autonomous Vehicle Perception

StradVision Inc. today announced that it has closed a Series C funding round of $88 million. The Seoul, South Korea-based company said it plans to continue developing its artificial intelligence-based perception for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems, or ADAS.

"We're thrilled to be announcing funding that will allow us to continue to lead and innovate in the ADAS space," said Junhwan Kim, CEO of StradVision. "We are very grateful for our partners' continued support. This year has been crucial to expanding our North American and global business, and their funding will allow us to continue to accelerate in this direction."

Founded in 2014, StradVision claimed that it is an automotive industry pioneer in AI-based vision processing. It also said it is accelerating the advent of fully autonomous vehicles by making ADAS features available at a fraction of the market cost compared with competitors.

SVNet provides perception on multiple platforms

StradVision said its SVNet technology enables external vehicle perception with more than 14 platforms to accurately and safely detect and recognize objects. The company asserted that it was the first network to run deep learning-based object-detection software on TDA2x, V3H, V3M, and H3.

Other StradVision products include SVNet Tools, which it said eliminates the need to have a large team spending hundreds of hours correcting objects with the risk of human error. The company added that its clients can expect to immediately and drastically reduce manpower, cost, and error.

In addition, partners can use SVNet's training suite to train their own data, making AI training simple, easy, and streamlined, said StradVision.

The company has partnered with OEMs to deploy SVNet on various vehicle models. It powers ADAS and autonomous vehicles worldwide and is serviced by over 300 employees in Seoul; San Jose, Calif.; Detroit; Tokyo; and Shanghai, as well as Friedrichshafen and Dusseldorf in Germany.

StradVision has been honored with the Gold Award at the 2021 AutoSens Awards for Best-in-Class Software for Perception Systems, and the 2020 Autonomous Vehicle Technology ACES Award in Autonomy (Software Category). In addition, StradVision's software is certified to the ISO 9001:2015 for Quality Management System and ISO 26262 for Automotive Functional Safety.

StradVision expects to grow with AV market

ZF and Aptiv were strategic investors in StradVision's Series C round. Automotive industry investors to date include Hyundai Motor Co., Hyundai Mobis, LG Electronics, AISIN (Japan), and ZF.

StradVision has now raised $129 million (U.S.) in cumulative funding, from its seed round through Series C. The company said it has seen "exponential" business and team growth over the past year. It opened its second German office and a new local subsidiary in Michigan.

In addition, StradVision has expanded its workforce 69.2% year over year to 308 employees as of June 2022.

Some self-driving technology developers have had problems lately. Momenta eliminated its aftermarket division, and Perceptive Automata reportedly shut down entirely. However, Research and Markets predicted that the global market for autonomous vehicles could expand from $42.2 billion in 2021 to $297 billion by 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.46%.

StradVision said it has successfully completed proof-of-concept (PoC) and production projects, paving the road to more mass production. Furthermore, the company has continued to work with partners and customers across OEMs and Tier 1 automotive suppliers worldwide to deploy the SVNet network on various vehicle models.