American streets are incredibly dangerous for pedestrians. A San Carlos, California-based startup called Obvio thinks it can change that by installing cameras at stop signs — a solution the founders also say won’t create a panopticon.
That’s a bold claim at a time when other companies like Flock have been criticized for how its license plate-reading cameras have become a crucial tool in an overreaching surveillance state.
Obvio founders Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari believe they can build a big enough business without indulging those worst impulses. They’ve designed the product with surveillance and data-sharing limitations to ensure they can follow through with that claim.
They’ve found deep pockets willing to believe them, too. The company has just completed a $22 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Obvio plans to use those funds to expand beyond the first five cities where it’s currently operating in Maryland.
Rehan and Maheshwari met while working at Motive, a company that makes dashboard cameras for the trucking industry. While there, Maheshwari told TechCrunch the pair realized “a lot of other normal passenger vehicles are awful drivers.”
The founders said they were stunned the more they looked into road safety. Not only were streets and crosswalks getting more dangerous for pedestrians, but in their eyes, the U.S. was also falling behind on enforcement.
“Most other countries are actually pretty good at this,” Maheshwari said. “They have speed camera technology. They have a good culture of driving safety. The U.S. is actually one of the worst across all the modern nations.”
Maheshwari and Rehan began studying up on road safety by reading books and attending conferences. They found that people in the industry gravitated toward three general solutions: education, engineering, and enforcement.
In their eyes, those approaches were often too separated from each other. It’s hard to quantify the impact of educational efforts. Local officials may try to fix a problematic intersection by, say, installing a roundabout, but that can take years of work and millions of dollars. And law enforcement can’t camp out at every stop sign.
Rehan and Maheshwari saw promise in combining them.
The result is a pylon (often brightly-colored) topped with a solar-powered camera that can be installed near almost any intersection. It’s designed not to blend in — part of the education and awareness aspect — and it’s also carefully engineered to be cheap and easy to install.
The on-device AI is trained to spot the worst types of stop sign or other infractions. (The company also claims on its website it can catch speeding, crosswalk violations, illegal turns, unsafe lane changes, and even distracted driving.) When one of these things happen, the system matches a car’s license plate to the state’s DMV database.
All of that information — the accuracy of the violation, the license plate — is verified by either Obvio staff or contractors before it’s sent to law enforcement, which then has to review the infractions before issuing a citation.
Obvio gives the tech to municipalities for free and makes money from the citations. Exactly how that citation revenue will get split between Obvio and the governments will vary from place to place, as Maheshwari said regulations about such agreements differ by state.
That clearly creates an incentive for increasing the number of citations. But Rehan and Maheshwari said they can build a business around stopping the worst offenses across a wide swath of American cities. They also said they want Obvio to remain present in — and responsive to — the communities that use their tech.
“Automated enforcement should be used in conjunction with community advocacy and community support, it shouldn’t be this camera that you put up that does revenue grab[s] and gotchas,” Maheshwari said. The goal is to “start using these cameras in a way to warn and deter the most egregious drivers [so] you can actually create communitywide support and behavior change.”
Cities and their citizens “need to trust us,” Maheshwari said.
There’s also a technological explanation for why Obvio’s cameras may not become an overpowered surveillance tool for law enforcement beyond their intended use.
Obvio’s camera pylon records and processes its footage locally. It’s only when a violation is spotted that the footage leaves the device. Otherwise, all other footage of vehicles and pedestrians passing through a given intersection stays on the device for about 12 hours before it gets deleted. (The footage is also technically owned by the municipalities, which have remote access.)
This doesn’t eliminate the chance that law enforcement will use the footage to surveil citizens in other ways. But it does reduce that chance.
That focus is what drove Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal to invest in Obvio.
“Yes, in the short term, you can maximize profits, and erode those values, but I think over time, it will limit the ability of this company to be ubiquitous. It’ll create enemies or create people who don’t want this,” he told TechCrunch. “Great founders are willing to sacrifice entire lines of business, frankly, and lots of revenue, in pursuit of the ultimate mission.”