Hayden AI, a San Francisco CA-based autonomous traffic management platform provider, raised $20M in Series A funding.
The round, which brought the total funding to over $30m, was led by TYH Ventures with participation from Autotech Ventures, BootstrapLabs and Modern Venture Partners.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its reach nationally and internationally, and to accelerate hiring across R&D, cybersecurity, and customer support.
Led by Michael Byrne, Chris Carson, Vaibhav Ghadiok, and Bo Shen, Hayden AI combines mobile sensors with artificial intelligence to allow governments to bridge the innovation gap while making traffic flow less dangerous and more efficient.
The company partners with government agencies to deploy its spatially aware technologies and encourages community and stakeholder participation through its digital platform, converting a city’s fleet of public and private vehicles into a smart fleet of sensors capable of autonomous traffic enforcement. By combining data from IoT sensors, the platform generates a digital twin of the city’s main roads and curbsides in real time to simulate scenarios and generate insights that enhance traffic management, including parking and curbside management.
Looking ahead, Hayden AI has its sights set on autonomous vehicles for further expansion of its traffic enforcement solution. The company plans to embed traffic enforcement rules, such as the location of bus lanes, bike lanes, no stopping zones, and no standing zones, into HD maps used by self-driving vehicles. By partnering with mapping companies, Hayden AI’s policy layers semantically annotated with traffic enforcement rules will be embedded into HD maps that help autonomous vehicles navigate. This will enable self-driving vehicles to automatically comply with traffic laws when navigating through cities without human interference. For instance, the vehicle will know not to pull over and pick up a passenger at a no stopping zone, or that cars can ride in bus lanes only at certain hours.