Streetlogic wants to help e-bike drivers have a safer experience on the road. The company announced a $2.1 million pre-order funding, as well as the launch of its flagship product, a surround-view camera that can predict front, side, and rear collisions, and notify the driver to prevent accidents.
Starting Tuesday, customers in the US, Canada and Europe can pre-order Streetlogic’s Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) for e-bikes with a down payment of $30. Final retail price will be in the $300 to $400 range, and the first batch of mass-production systems are expected to ship in late 2022, according to the company. Jonathan Denby, CEO and Founder of Streetlogic. Customers based in San Francisco, where Streetlogic is headquartered, will be eligible to try out one of the systems sooner through an invite-only, limited beta rollout that begins early in the year. after.
Streetlogic isn’t the first to come up with an ADAS system with micro-mobility. Last year, the Israeli startup Ride Vision introduced a The AI-based system analyzes traffic around the driver in real time, providing forward collision warning, blind spot monitoring, and warnings when getting too close behind another vehicle. Like Streetlogic, Ride Vision’s system can also record the ride, acting as a dash cam to record safety incidents for later review.
More recently, cVisionary companies like Luna or Drover AI have developed similar technology for e-scooters operated by shared micro-operators Elephant and Spin respectively. The technology here is similar, but the target markets are different.
“The difference is that we’re customizing the vision system to provide smart safety features to the rider, while they’re using the vision system to help the scooter driver play better on city roads.” street,” said Denby TechCrunch. “Their features are sidewalk detection or parking compliance features that scooter riders need to demonstrate that they’re keeping riders playing nice. Ours is just about the safety of the scooter. the driver itself, like if you’re in traffic, this will give you an early warning if a vehicle on the road collides with you so you can keep yourself safe.”
The other big difference is that the Luna and Drover can connect to the scooter’s operating system and take control, causing the rider to slow to a stop if they’re walking on the sidewalk or are unfit. Streetlogic’s product is purely a collision warning system, but it can still be a very useful tool, especially in cities.
“From a safety perspective, you don’t always have an eye around you – you can’t, and when you go to work, it’s like your retreat time, so you’re often thinking, or at least “Most of all to me, I don’t think about safety. I just think about getting to work or all the things I have to do that day,” said Taylor, one of Streetlogic’s early beta testers who was ride an e-bike to work said daily, for a testimonials on company website.
The number of preventable cyclist deaths in the US increased by 6% in 2019 from 793 in 2010 to 1,089 in 2019, and among them 843 people died in collisions with motor vehicles. Even as sales of e-bikes soar, cars still pose a threat to micromobility adoption in cities, where 78% of fatal bike crashes occur. Consumers looking to replace their cars with e-bikes may want to make sure they’re riding something with similar safety features, such as an ADAS system.
“I have this utopian vision where I think the world would be great if there were more e-bikes on the roads and cities than cars,” Denby told TechCrunch. “You need a few cars, but most probably bicycles, so I think making the e-bike a more reliable tool in your daily life as the main way to you commuting is the key to making that happen.”
Streetlogic’s system, which is attached to both the front and rear of the bike, is based on computer vision implemented entirely on the device. It monitors the behavior and movement of vehicles around the driver, providing early warnings if the driver is on the road to potentially collide with a car. Processing and alerts are both done on a fully closed loop integrated system, so it doesn’t require any connection to the cloud and works even when the rider is in a remote area. have service.
The driver will first hear an audible warning, which comes from the hardware itself, and can say something like “car reverse” if a car is speeding behind the driver, for example. There is an accompanying visual alert on the driver’s smartphone that simply points in the direction of a potential obstacle and requires a quick look, but the feature only makes sense if the driver attaches his or her phone. they into the phone holder on the handlebars.
We researched Streetlogic’s website to understand why it’s listed as an e-bike product instead of all bikes, and it looks like it’s because it gets its power from the e-bike death the battery. Perhaps the addition of a power source to the system could make it applicable to a larger group of cyclists in general.
Drover AI and Luna have systems that can already detect objects like pedestrians and lanes, but not proactively warn e-scooter drivers about potential crashes, although given the state of their technology, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Alex Nesic, CEO of Drover AI, told TechCrunch that e-bike warning systems make sense as a “next-level” feature in the high-end market, but “they’re likely not enough” low cost of shared apps, that’s what we’re focusing on right now.”
It’s still early days for Streetlogic, but Denby says the technology has performed “surprisingly well” in alpha testing. Denby says the system only tracks cars because collisions or near misses with cars are the most common problems for cyclists.
“But the nice thing about visibility is that you can add more behavior to it over time,” he says. “Just like it can track cyclists and pedestrians, potholes and cracks in the road, animals running into the street. These are all things we can accumulate it over time. Even when we started with just cars, we covered the majority of incidents.”
Streetlogic will have to collect more data to train its ML models so it can build on those findings. That’s a large portion of the funding. Pre-seed ring, coming from LDV Capital, Trucks Venture Capital and angel investors like Luc Vincent, former Lyft EVP of autonomous driving, will be used to scale the team, according to the company. The startup now has six full-time employees after hiring two more team members last week, but hopes to expand the payroll to be able to both deliver on pre-orders and have additional capacity. system maturity.
“We have a great team of super hard people from Apple and Uber on the hardware side and then Cruise on the software side,” said Denby.
Denby himself is from Uber, where he consulted on the computer vision system for the company’s Jump scooters, which was later acquired by Lime, and he also led the team building the 360-degree Rylo action camera .
While Streetlogic is launching as a B2C product for a quick start to success, the company still wants to pursue integration with bike manufacturers in the future.
