American streets are extremely dangerous to pedestrians. The San Carlos, California-based startup called Obvio believes that by installing a camera at the stop sign, it can change it. This is a solution that says that the founder doesn’t create panopticons.
This is a bold claim when other companies like Flock are criticised for their license plate reading cameras becoming an important tool beyond surveillance conditions.
Obvio founders Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari believe they can build enough business without indulging in these worst impulses. They designed products with restrictions on surveillance and data sharing to ensure that their claims could be tracked.
They found a deep pocket that was believing in them and pleased. The company has completed a $22 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Obvio plans to use these funds to expand beyond the first five cities currently operating in Maryland.
Rehan and Maheshwari met while working at Motive, a company that manufactures dashboard cameras for the trucking industry. While there, Maheshwari told TechCrunch that he realized “many other normal passenger cars are terrible drivers.”
The founder said the more they looked into road safety, the more unsettled they were. Not only are the streets and crosswalks becoming more dangerous to pedestrians, but in their eyes the US was also behind the enforcement.
“Most other countries are actually pretty good at this,” Maheshwari said. “They have speed camera technology. They have a good culture that promotes safety. The US is actually one of the worst in all modern countries.”
Maheshwari and Rehan began their studies on road safety by reading books and attending meetings. They found that people in the industry are drawn to three common solutions: education, engineering and enforcement.
In their eyes, their approaches were often too separate from each other. The impact of educational efforts is difficult to quantify. Local officials may try to fix a problematic intersection by installing a roundabout, for example, but that can cost years of work and millions of dollars. And law enforcement is not allowed to camp at all stops.
Rehan and Maheshwari saw the promise to combine them.
As a result, there are pylons (often brightly colored) topped with solar-powered cameras that can be installed near almost any intersection. It is designed to not blend some of the educational and conscious aspects, and is carefully designed to be inexpensive and easy to install.
AI on the device is trained to find the worst kind of stop sign or other violation. (The company also claims that it can catch speeding, crossing crossing violations, illegal turns, unsafe lane changes, and even distracted driving.) When one of these occurs, the system matches the car’s license plate to the state’s DMV database.
All that information – the accuracy of the violation, the license plate – must be verified by an obvio staff or contractor before being sent to law enforcement and verified for the violation before issuing a quotation.
obvio offers this technology to local governments for free and earns money from quotes. As Maheshwari said regulations on such contracts differ from state to state, how that citation revenue is divided between Obvio and the government will vary from place to place.
It clearly creates an incentive to increase the number of citations. But Rehan and Maheswhari said they could build businesses that would prevent the worst crimes in a wide range of American cities. They also said they hope they are present in the community that uses their technology and forget to respond.
“Automatic enforcement should be used in conjunction with community advocacy and community support. It should not be this camera that does revenue grabs and gotcha,” Maheshwari said. The goal is “to start using these cameras and warn and stop the worst drivers (yes) we can actually create community-wide support and behavioral change.”
The city and its citizens “have to trust us,” Maheshwari said.
There is also a technical explanation as to why Obvio cameras don’t become an overwhelming surveillance tool for law enforcement beyond their intended use.
Obvio’s camera pylon records and processes the footage locally. The video will only leave the device when a violation is discovered. Otherwise, all other footage of vehicles and pedestrians passing through a particular intersection will remain on the device for about 12 hours until deleted. (This video is technically owned by a local government and can be accessed remotely.)
This does not rule out the possibility that law enforcement agencies will use footage to monitor citizens in other ways. But it reduces that chance.
Its focus was inspiring Bain Capital Ventures Parnatar Ajay Agarwal to invest in obsio.
“Yes, in the short term, you can maximize profits and erode those values, but over time I think this company will limit the ubiquitous capabilities. You will create enemies or create people who don’t want this,” he told TechCrunch. “The great founder is willing to frankly sacrifice a lot of revenue in order to pursue the ultimate mission.”