Written by: Dr. Benjamin Schmidt, PhD

Back in July 2019, RoadBotics closed on a $7.5 million Series A investment round led by Radical Ventures with follow on investments from HyperPlane Venture Capital and Wharton Alumni Angels of Silicon Valley, as well as several earlier stage investors in the company. We had acquired over 150 clients in 23 states and 11 countries. We were developing and constantly improving a world-class road assessment platform using artificial intelligence, and our team was positioned for great growth. 

Just over one year later, where does RoadBotics stand?

We are proud to report that we stand on very solid ground. 

Our client list has expanded to include over 200 communities and more than 30 partners in 34 states and 14 countries, with several of our newer clients being much larger cities. These large cities like Savannah, Detroit, and South Bend have saved countless man hours using our simple road data collection methods. Even smaller communities with more constrained budgets have used our unbiased ratings to carefully plan maintenance to save money.

RoadWay, our road assessment platform, has undergone numerous upgrades during the last year to enhance the development of road management plans. Our user experience is now the best in the business. Not only can our clients now share their interactive assessment map with their communities using the Embedded Maps tool, users can now also take a virtual drive down any section of their assessed road network. 

We have dedicated ourselves to listening to our clients’ needs. And after our clients requested the ability to locate every pothole in their network, we dedicated a large portion of our Series A funding to developing that capability. This led to our debut of an industry-first option in road assessments: Individual Distress Identification (IDI). In addition to potholes, our technology can now identify every road surface deterioration automatically.  

The RoadBotics team has continued to build on RoadWay’s success by introducing another new, industry-first product called AgileMapper, which enables rapid geospatial inventorying and asset mapping. AgileMapper is helping communities create image inventories of their public infrastructure assets including roads, sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails. 

We continue to advance at an incredible pace with our new funding and new operational support from our investors. Some of these milestones happened in the first six months following the Series A investment, but many of them happened during the last six months - and despite a worldwide pandemic. 

To say our team was able to adapt to a new normal would be an understatement. While we loved working together in person as a team, we are proving every day that working remotely is not only possible, but can even accelerate creativity and innovation.

Unprecedented challenges in our industry and our country have many searching for answers to our infrastructure challenges where none exist and attempting to make predictions on funding and maintenance with many unknowns. The RoadBotics Team has kept moving forward with the guidance of our investors and advisors and the perseverance of our talented team. 

Now more than ever, RoadBotics is helping to deliver a technological revolution to the way governments of all sizes manage and maintain their infrastructure. Our clients receive a world-class product and support, and the entire team is proud to help government officials stand on the solid ground afforded by mixing advanced technology with society's needs.