Nexar and Vay Partner on AI Safety for Remote Driving
AI mobility firm Nexar is partnering with Vay to integrate predictive AI safety technology into the world's first commercial remotely driven vehicle fleet. The collaboration will embed Nexar's incident prediction model into Vay's remote driving platform, adding a proactive safety layer as the teledriving service scales.
Vay, a Berlin-based teledriving firm, launched its commercial service in Las Vegas in January 2024. The service uses human operators to remotely deliver electric Kia vehicles to customers, who then drive themselves to their destination before a remote "teledriver" takes over again for parking or the next trip. Nexar, an AI vision company from Israel, operates a massive crowd-sourced visual data network from dash cameras. This network captures imagery from over 150 million miles of driving each month, creating a near real-time, anonymized "digital twin" of road conditions, including hazards like potholes and work zones. The collaboration centers on Nexar's foundation model, BADAS (Beyond ADAS), which moves beyond reactive safety systems. By learning from billions of miles of real-world driving data, the model aims to proactively identify risks, allowing Vay's remote operators to anticipate and avoid potential incidents. Both companies are heavily backed by investors. Vay has raised approximately $192 million from backers including Atomico and Grab Holdings. Nexar has secured around $150 million in total funding over six rounds from investors such as Qumra Capital and State Farm Ventures. Vay is expanding its Las Vegas fleet to 100 vehicles and has secured an 8,500-square-foot production facility in the city. Beyond its consumer rental model, the company is also launching business-to-business services, offering its teledriving technology for logistics, trucking, and car-sharing fleets. The teledriving model is positioned as a cost-effective and scalable alternative to fully autonomous robotaxis, which can be limited by geography and weather. The broader autonomous vehicle market is projected to grow into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry by 2030.
