Volvo Cars Tech Fund invests in driver monitoring startup CorrActions
CorrActions, an Israeli startup that, among other things, built a driver monitoring system that can understand a driver’s cognitive state, today announced that it has raised a strategic investment from Volvo Cars Tech Fund. According to the company, the target for this round is $6 million.
The idea behind CorrActions is to use sensors that are already built into the car to monitor the driver’s micro muscle movements. These movements, the company argues, can reflect brain activity that CorrActions’ algorithms can then evaluate to check if the driver is tired, distracted or intoxicated. Simply using a cell phone and watching users interact with an app, CorrActions CEO Ilan Reingold told me during a meeting in Israel earlier this year, the company can determine blood alcohol levels with 90 percent accuracy and zero false positives (CorrActions previously worked with Volkswagen on a POC for this).
Image Credits: CorrActions
“Today, we’re working with several OEMs and large fleet managers to monitor the capabilities of the person behind the wheel,” Reingold noted, but he also stressed that companies building autonomous driving fleets could use this system to monitor the motion sickness level of passengers, for example, to manage how the car drives to ensure that passengers feel comfortable. That, however, would be powered by a camera-based system or millimeter wave radar.
Currently, the company mostly works with data from steering wheel sensors and pressure-based seat sensors, as well as motion data from apps used by fleet managers to communicate with their drivers.
“With the Tech Fund, we aim to be a strategic partner of choice for exciting start-ups that can help boost our position as a tech leader in our industry,” said Alexander Petrofski, head of the Volvo Cars Tech Fund. “CorrActions fits the bill perfectly and focuses on a mission that is close to our heart: making cars and traffic safer.”
Volvo notes that the company’s EX90 flagship electric SUV already includes numerous systems to understand a driver’s cognitive state. “The CorrActions technology is a highly relevant complement to our driver understanding system. As a result, we’ve decided to take a stake in CorrActions to support the further development and commercialization of its technology,” Volvo Cars Tech Fund explains in the funding announcement.
Founded in 2019 by neuropsychologist Elad Hochman and business executive Zvi Ginosar in 2019, the company previously raised a $2.7 million seed round in 2021. The company brought on Reingold, who previously held a number of executive and R&D roles at various startups and large enterprises like Broadcom and Sony, in June 2022 to take the CEO role.