Israeli tech Nexar buys Portuguese tech startup Veniam

  • Lusa
  • 3 August 2022

Nexar has signed "an agreement to acquire Veniam, the Portuguese technology-based startup that is at the forefront of intelligent networking software for the Internet of Moving Things."

Israeli technology company Nexar announced on Wednesday that it will buy Portuguese startup Veniam to “transform vehicles into data engines,” opening up “unlimited possibilities for a new class of mobility applications.”

“This acquisition represents one of the first times that an Israeli company has acquired a Portuguese technological ‘startup’, thus becoming a milestone for the innovation ecosystem in Portugal that is attracting more and more international attention as an important European ‘hub’ of ‘startups’,” the company said in a statement.

Nexar, which claims to be a leader in artificial intelligence computer vision, has signed “an agreement to acquire Veniam, the Portuguese technology-based startup that is at the forefront of intelligent networking software for the Internet of Moving Things.”

With this purchase, the Israeli technology company “combines the vision data captured and processed from billions of miles of driving with Veniam’s cutting-edge communications technologies”, and together the two companies “will exponentially increase the coverage and reduce the costs of data-rich mobility applications and real-time mapping of the physical world”.

Vehicles are “increasingly data engines” and Nexar “is at the forefront of collecting that data”, says the technology company.

“Images crowdsourced from Nexar’s popular dashcams are processed to create and continuously update a digital twin of America’s roads and cities,” the statement said.

For its part, Veniam, with a development centre in Porto, “has worked with dozens of global companies as clients, developing a software platform that allows devices in cars to connect to each other and to the Internet.”

In an interview with Lusa about a year and a half ago, Veniam’s chief executive advanced the goal of having 200,000 vehicles connected with his technology in the next 12 months, which was actually surpassed.

Veniam’s technology turns cars into Internet access points for other devices, creating a mesh network capable of sharing data and connectivity between hundreds of thousands of devices and vehicles.

Veniam is a Portuguese technology-based start-up that resulted from the spin-off of the University of Porto, the University of Aveiro and the Institute of Telecommunications.

“Veniam is a natural choice for Nexar,” says Eran Shir, co-founder and CEO of Nexar, quoted in a statement.

“As Veniam’s customers, we have become very familiar with their technology and the incredible team behind it. It thus became obvious that we can achieve much more with them as our colleagues at Nexar. With Veniam, we will continue to scale our data coverage and expand our offering to car manufacturers,” said Eran Shir.

Veniam founder and CEO João Barros, who is now Nexar’s chief platform officer, said that the Israeli technology “is collecting and distributing data on an unprecedented scale.”

With this operation, “we are very excited to be joining this international team, where we have the opportunity to work together to transfer huge amounts of data to the cloud securely and cost-effectively, and help make our vehicles and cities smarter, safer and more sustainable.”