Seeva, a Detroit-based company with offices in Seattle that designs visibility systems for mobility platforms, today announced it has raised $2 million in seed funding. The investment will be used to both expand its team and develop new product solutions in the mobility space.
Seeva, a 2016 graduate of the Techstars Mobility business incubator program, located at Ford Field in downtown Detroit, says its seed round includes support from Trucks VC, Dynamo VC, Expansion VC, Haystack VC, and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.
“When Jere Lansinger, my co-founder and dad, retired from Chrysler after 40 years as an automotive engineer, he took with him an approved list of projects he continued to tinker with into retirement. This is how Seeva started,” says Diane Lansinger, co-founder and CEO of Seeva.
“Realizing the visibility problems facing autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems, Jere created a washer fluid heating product that cleans and helps these vehicles see more safely and reliably. At SEEVA, we’re creating a trustworthy family of innovative, patent-protected products that are going to build driver and rider confidence in self-driving cars by making the hardware and software in these autonomous vehicles see the road more clearly.”
BI Intelligence, Intel, and Strategy Analytics have projected that 10 million autonomous vehicles will be driving on the road within the next two years, amounting to a $7 trillion market by 2050. With autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems beginning to go mainstream, one of the current limitations of the vehicles is their inability to see in poor weather and environment conditions such as bugs, mud, snow, freezing rain, and ice.
Seeva offers a patented washer fluid heating system called “Seevatherm.” The device can direct cleaning fluid to windshields, cameras, LIDAR, sensors, headlamps, tail lamps, and other advanced driver assistance hardware. The components on autonomous cars and trucks can be quickly cleaned to maintain visibility and keep passengers and cargo safe, the company says.
