Apex.AI is an autonomous vehicle software company that exited from stealth mode last week and announced it raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by Canaan Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
According to TechCrunch, Apex.AI is claiming it has designed an operating system for autonomous vehicles that will never fail. Apex.AI’s first two products are known as Apex.OS and Apex.Autonomy. Apex.OS is a software framework / meta-operating system for autonomous mobility — which is essentially a modified version of the Robot Operating System (ROS). And Apex.Autonomy provides developers with building blocks from an ecosystem like LiDAR data processing to compose a software stack that is right for their applications.
Apex.AI was founded by automated systems engineers Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic. Pangercic was one of the early contributors to ROS and worked on software frameworks for over 10 years. And Becker worked on autonomous vehicle software for more than 20 years.
Here is a video of how Apex.AI’s technology works:
“We believe in a modular and diverse approach to software. Hence, we have designed a modular software stack, that allows for easy integration into existing systems as well as easy integration of 3rd party software,” wrote Becker in a Medium post. “We think highly focused specialists can develop a better overall system than one company developing a full-stack — which will likely not fit all applications. Our software is not designed for peak performance — it’s designed to never fail. We’ve built redundancies into the system design to ensures that single failures don’t lead to system-wide failures.”
