Pirelli invests in AI vision systems startup to expand cyber tire technology

Milan, Italy – Pirelli has signed a partnership agreement with Swedish AI vision startup Univrses and acquired a 30% stake in the business to expand applications for its cyber tire technology.

In a 29 April statement, the Italian tire maker said the agreement includes an option to increase the holding to a majority stake but did not provide further financial details.

Founded in 2015 in Stockholm, Univrses originally developed a technology to give cars the ability to “make sense of their surroundings,” using vehicle-mounted cameras.

The technology has since been adapted to turn vehicles into "AI-enabled road monitoring agents."

According to Pirelli, the Swedish startup has developed 3DAI Engine - software that gives autonomous vehicles perception capability (3D positioning, 3D mapping, spatial deep learning); and 3DAI which is “an AI-powered system that digitises city and roadside infrastructure, fed by the data from sensors, such as cameras, installed on vehicles.”

Under the partnership, Univrses’ vision technology will be integrated into Pirelli’s cyber tire platform, which uses sensors embedded in tires to collect and transmit data in real time.

Pirelli said the combined technologies could deliver “safer and more performant” vehicles, supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous driving functions and infrastructure monitoring.

According to the tire maker, onboard cameras and tires would work together to collect data on road conditions, while software analyses the information and sends it to vehicle systems or the cloud.

The system, it added, could also provide road authorities with “timely, relevant and actionable data” to improve maintenance planning and resource deployment.

Universes and Pirelli carried out their first joint project in Italy last year.

As part of that project, Pirelli and the Apulia regional government launched a road monitoring system using cyber tire data combined with camera images interpreted through Univrses technology.

Pirelli CEO Andrea Casaluci said the agreement “further enhances our cyber tire platform, thanks to advanced AI based artificial vision technologies.”

“The collaboration between Pirelli and Univrses will make a significant contribution to the ongoing transformation of cars into true software defined vehicles,” he added.

According to Univrses chief Jonathan Selbie, “continuous monitoring and data are becoming the new foundation for infrastructure asset management.”

With Pirelli as an investor, Selbie said, the companies are taking the partnership “to the next level.”