Hayden: Vision AI Platform Company Raises $90 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Jul 21, 2024

Hayden AI Technologies, a leader in vision AI solutions for smart cities, announced $90 million in new growth equity financing. This Series C round was led by The Rise Fund and was supported by existing investors such as the Drawdown Fund and Autotech Ventures, and others.

This funding round will accelerate the company’s research, development and growth. And the funding comes as the company has expanded its market leadership and customer base domestically and internationally.

Hayden AI’s vision AI platform utilizes geospatial data collection sensor systems to offer comprehensive smart city intelligence and is used by some of the nation’s largest cities and transit agencies, including New York’s MTA, Washington DC’s Metro, Los Angeles Metro, the East Bay’s AC Transit, and others, to detect and enforce parking and moving violations that obstruct public transportation and road safety. And Hayden AI’s platform could be mounted on virtually any vehicle type – offering a level of insight and situational awareness that cities can use to make better decisions to achieve their operational and sustainability goals.

Along with enforcing parking and moving violations, Hayden AI’s vision AI platform can detect and predict traffic congestion, monitor city assets, and optimize transportation networks, which helps cities improve public safety, sustainability, and efficiency.

In New York City, automated camera enforcement resulted in 5% faster buses along with enforced routes and 20% fewer vehicle collisions. And the MTA estimates that automated camera enforcement has contributed to a 5% to 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The MTA also recently announced that the program is being expanded to bus stop and double parking enforcement.

Hayden AI’s technology not only helped cities realize meaningful gains in safety and efficiency, but it has also earned the company accolades, including recognition on the GovTech100 list for four consecutive years.

KEY QUOTES:

“With The Rise Fund, we can develop our platform into a true urban operating system – processing data and generating actionable insights that help cities become more livable for everyone. This new financing lets us invest in long-term technology development to explore new applications for our platform. TPG’s The Rise Fund has a long track record of successfully scaling socially impactful companies across the technology and climate sectors and we are thrilled to partner with them to continue to empower cities to transform sustainability, road safety, and accessibility.”

– Chris Carson, founder and CEO of Hayden AI

“Large cities have a dual mandate of increasing operational performance and safety of their public transit systems while improving their energy efficiency. Hayden AI’s proprietary technology offers a solution that sits at the intersection of accessibility, safety, and sustainability and is well aligned with The Rise Fund’s pursuit of rapidly growing businesses that deliver social and environmental impact at scale. Leveraging Hayden AI’s industry-leading accuracy and adaptability, we look forward to building on their success with the largest US cities to scale their technology into additional use-cases and new cities domestically and internationally.”

– Steve Ellis, a Managing Partner of The Rise Funds