FiveAI win equity funding to develop Level 5 vehicle autonomy

The funding, led by Amadeus Capital Partners with Spring Partners and Notion Capital, will enable Bristol-based FiveAI to grow its team, step-up its development and begin simulator and road testing of its software.

According to FiveAI, early approaches to autonomous vehicles have required accurate, 3D maps built using point cloud technology. In use, each vehicle then correlates against that map to work out where it is and establish a track to follow.

The company is now planning a system using much stronger AI and ML to ensure that autonomous vehicles can safely and accurately navigate all environments, including complex urban ones, with simpler maps.  That approach will avoid the need to survey, maintain and share detailed 3D maps of the 37.2 million km of paved and unpaved road networks across the world.

FiveAI’s technology aims to deliver a safe and verifiable solution by combining supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to build a real-time, accurate view of the world. This enhanced perception capability is key to enabling FiveAI to then apply further advanced AI technologies to better predict the actions and interactions between entities, and use that prediction to establish the actions of the vehicle itself.