Fleet safety company Netradyne’s solutions are backed by AI—as well as by a decidedly less technological tool: positive reinforcement.
The San Diego-based company, founded in 2015, is built on the idea that focusing on the positive over the negative—with cutting-edge tech to help—can help make roads safer.
“Why not tell someone they’re doing a good job every day?” Adam Kahn, Netradyne’s chief business development officer, told Tech Brew. “If I can, every day, put a little star next to your name and say you did a good job that day, you’re shifting the safety culture to a reward-based safety culture versus a punitive-based safety culture—and that has monumental increases across fleet results.”
On the road: Safety is a pressing issue in the trucking industry and in transportation overall, given the steep number of traffic fatalities in the US every year.
Netradyne’s solution is a safety platform equipped with “cutting-edge HD video safety and management technology powered by advanced AI,” according to the company. The platform uses vision-based object detection to analyze “every minute of drive time with up to 99% accuracy.” The company has analyzed more than 20 billion driving miles.
One of the ways Netradyne uses positive reinforcement is through its DriverStars program, which as of July had awarded more than 100 million events. The program “utilizes real-time analysis and edge computing to capture positive behaviors and reward drivers,” according to a news release.
The program includes a “GreenZone” score that provides rewards based on performance, a way of gamifying safety improvements. The company claims that improvements to this score correlate to reductions in crashes.
“We’ve seen some really great results where drivers and fleets that embrace this philosophy of ‘High five, fist bump, good job,’ versus, ‘Got a minute? I’ve gotta talk to you,’” Kahn said. “Nobody likes that.”
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He pointed to four risky driving behaviors that tend to cause crashes: speed, distraction, driving too closely behind the vehicle in front of you, and ignoring traffic signals.
“What we started to do was track essentially the full data set around all those activities. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, driver, you had three minutes of driving distracted,’ I really want to look at the amount of time that you were driving non-distracted,” Kahn said. “If I can create awareness around your compliance, the next thing I can do is try to incentivize the improvement of that compliance.”
The road ahead: In January, Netradyne closed a $90 million Series D funding round. Kahn said that the fresh funding will support customer care, the company’s ongoing expansion into new global markets, and R&D.
Netradyne is introducing some predictive elements to its platform.
“Instead of waiting for a vehicle or a driver to do something, based on where they’re at, I can start to forecast and assist the driver in moments where maybe there’s an ice storm,” Kahn said. “I think there’s an opportunity where we can get in front of some of these issues versus reacting to them.”
Netradyne CEO and co-founder Avneesh Agrawal previously told TechCrunch that the company plans to leverage its data to train a driving model that could be used by autonomous vehicle companies. And he said the company is investing more in generative AI to enhance its copilot tool.
“Three years ago, if we talked about AI versus today, vastly different. Three years from now when we talk about AI versus today, it’ll be vastly different,” Kahn told us. “And we’re very committed to being on the leading edge of innovation.”