Daniel Pelaez first had the idea for what would eventually become Cyvl while working a summer job on a public works road crew in a small Connecticut town. He spent his days there driving around in a pickup truck looking for things to fix.
One day, he asked the foreman if there was a better way to route the crew. “He showed me all these huge six-inch binders behind his desk…a manual audit that a civil engineering consulting firm did seven years ago,” Pelaez said. “After one winter, that data was just out of date.”
Fast-forward several years, and Pelaez’s startup, Cyvl (pronounced “civil”), now has a better way to flag issues like potholes, bad pavement conditions, or broken signs. It involves cars outfitted with lidar, consumer-grade cameras—think GoPros—and 3D-printed sensors that collect data to build a digital model of a town or city. Computer vision models classify elements like signs and sidewalks and scan for cracks or damage.
Cyvl currently counts more than 100 towns and cities as customers, and it’s done work with 300 total, mostly in the United States, according to Pelaez. The company raised $14 million in Series A funding this month in a round led by Sentinel Global.
In addition to expanding to more places, Pelaez said the money will help Cyvl to continue building tools across other stages of infrastructure building and maintenance, from planning and construction to operation.
“We’ve sort of mastered the art of putting sensors in the world, digitizing infrastructure, and getting conditions on things,” Pelaez said. “We want to start tackling the rest of…the life cycle of infrastructure.”
Street smarts: Pelaez said a confluence of factors have contributed to Cyvl’s success. The cost of lidar devices has declined steeply since he first worked on that road crew. The pandemic helped spur a boom in the government tech market as municipalities and agencies looked to digitize, which has been furthered by the AI wave, he said.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
Add to that a flood of federal dollars for roads and bridges from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, Pelaez said.
“There’s a lot of new funding still trickling down the pipes. We just heard from a town the other day that [is] still trying to figure out how to get what was approved in fiscal year ’22—to even get [those dollars] so they could kick off a project,” Pelaez said. “Fortunately, a lot of infrastructure is a bipartisan issue. People want to keep building great roads, making them safer for everybody.”
While Pelaez said Cyvl’s tech can be applied to a range of different cities and towns, its “sweet spot” is “suburban communities outside of a city where they’re seeing lots of population growth, lots of infrastructure build.”
And as more startups join the space, Pelaez said Cyvl’s proprietary hardware stack and end-to-end platform differentiate it, especially from those that crowdsource dashcam or phone footage. “We really bring that full 3D digital twin with sub-centimeter accuracy of the dimension [of the] road or the width of a sidewalk or how long a crack might be,” he said.
Down the road: Pelaez said Cyvl has an ambitious “North Star” goal of working with at least “1,000 governments across the US” in the next two years.
“Our overall mission [is] helping towns or cities build roads 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper,” Pelaez said. “We have a ways to go, but that’s really what we want to unlock for them based on this end-to-end solution.”