Belgium’s IVEX has closed a €5 million (approximately $5.81 million USD) Series A funding round to expand its AI-powered platform for autonomous vehicle safety testing into North America and Asia, the company announced on September 10, 2026. The round was backed by returning investors The Faktory and Dedicated.lu alongside a group of private investors, confirming continued institutional confidence in what has quietly become one of the most structurally consequential positions in European automotive safety: IVEX is the official software provider for Euro NCAP’s on-road ADAS evaluation program, meaning its algorithms are already generating the scores that determine whether new cars earn Europe’s most-trusted safety rating.

The raise arrives at a moment when the demands placed on automotive safety testing are escalating faster than traditional methods can handle. Europe’s General Safety Regulation Phase 3, known as GSR2, entered force on July 7, 2026, mandating stricter performance requirements for speed assist, advanced driver distraction warning systems, and pedestrian detection across all new vehicles sold in the EU. At the same time, Euro NCAP’s overhauled 2026–2028 assessment protocol has restructured its entire framework and more than doubled the number of individual test scenarios — to over 1,200 — including new head-on collision cases with closing speeds of up to 200 km/h (124 mph). That explosion in testing complexity is IVEX’s market: every additional scenario is more data that someone has to process, and IVEX exists to automate that processing.

ADAS Compliance Is Now a Data-Processing Problem

Modern vehicles run what are effectively software platforms on wheels, with ADAS stacks that must simultaneously recognize speed-limit signs, detect pedestrians, hold a lane, and adapt cruise speed — then prove they do all of this correctly under real-world conditions before the car can be sold. Every on-road test campaign generates enormous volumes of camera footage, LiDAR point clouds, radar returns, CAN bus logs, and GPS traces. Under traditional methods, engineers reviewed that footage manually: watching video, reading signs, cross-referencing dashboard displays, and scoring whether the vehicle responded within the applicable protocol’s tolerances. That process cannot scale without a proportional and expensive increase in engineering headcount.

The RAND Corporation’s foundational analysis of autonomous vehicle safety, published in 2016, established that demonstrating AV systems are no worse than a human driver — with statistical confidence — could require hundreds of billions of miles of failure-free testing under some scenarios. That figure made clear that manual validation was never going to work at the scale the industry needed. With Euro NCAP’s test scenario count now exceeding 1,200 and GSR2 mandating specific performance benchmarks across every vehicle model sold in Europe, the bottleneck in getting safer autonomous features to market is not engineering talent or compute power — it is verifiable, traceable, regulation-aligned validation.

IVEX’s platform addresses this directly. Using computer vision, cloud-based AI, and automated data pipelines, it ingests multi-sensor driving data from real on-road test campaigns and automates the most labor-intensive portions of the analysis. For Speed Limit Information Function (SLIF) evaluation — a key GSR2-mandated ADAS feature — the platform automatically detects every speed limit sign encountered during a test drive and compares it against the vehicle’s dashboard display, flagging every instance where the vehicle failed to recognize or correctly display the applicable limit. According to the company, its platform can reduce engineering time required to analyze testing data by more than 95 percent. In one reported example, the platform processed 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data in just eight hours of engineering time. That compression ratio — achieved by running parallel AI analysis across sensor streams rather than sequential human review — is what makes scale possible.

The platform operates with a human-in-the-loop model. Engineers review the platform’s output and retain control over final assessments, which is not a limitation but a deliberate design choice: in a domain where traceability and auditability are regulatory requirements, IVEX’s architecture ensures that every result can be traced back to the specific data that generated it.

Why IVEX’s Regulatory Position Matters More Than the Efficiency Gains

The 95 percent time reduction is the number that makes headlines, but the structural significance of IVEX’s position runs deeper. As official software provider to Euro NCAP — the organization whose five-star ratings most European car buyers rely on — IVEX is now embedded directly in the compliance workflow that determines whether a vehicle can compete in the European market.

When Euro NCAP scores a vehicle’s ADAS performance on a 2,000-kilometer (approximately 1,243-mile) public-road test route, those scores are generated in part by IVEX’s algorithms. When UTAC, one of Europe’s major automotive testing and certification bodies, recently completed its validation campaign for Speed Assist System testing in support of its Euro NCAP 2026 accreditation, it did so using IVEX’s tooling. That kind of institutional entrenchment — as the scoring software behind accredited regulatory bodies — is the position a startup occupies when it stops being a vendor and starts being infrastructure.

The 2026 Euro NCAP protocol overhaul makes that infrastructure role even more significant. Euro NCAP has restructured its assessments across four stages of a potential accident: Safe Driving, Crash Avoidance, Crash Protection, and Post-Crash Safety — with 100 points available in each category. The expansion into extensive on-road evaluation, rather than controlled test-track scenarios alone, is precisely the domain where IVEX’s tooling is most differentiated: test-track validation software has existed for decades, but automated processing of real public-road data at scale is where IVEX has built its moat.

How the Platform Actually Works

IVEX’s technical stack combines three elements: a lightweight, easily installed hardware rig mounted on a test vehicle; a cloud-based AI processing pipeline; and a scoring and reporting layer aligned to specific regulatory requirements.

The hardware rig is designed so that one driver can conduct multi-country data collection campaigns without specialized technical setup — the company describes installation as ready in less than a day. During an on-road test run, the hardware captures camera footage (both road-facing and driver-facing to read dashboard displays), radar returns, and vehicle telemetry via CAN bus integration.

In the cloud, IVEX applies computer vision models trained to detect and classify speed limit signs under real-world conditions — including variable lighting, weather, and non-standard signage — and to read the corresponding speed limit display inside the vehicle. The AI layers also handle object detection (pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles), lane detection, and anonymization of footage for privacy compliance. Automated KPI scoring then evaluates each event against the specific metric demanded by the applicable protocol: for Euro NCAP SLIF evaluation, did the vehicle recognize the sign? Did it display the correct limit within the protocol’s tolerance window? Were there any missed signs or incorrect readings?

Results are delivered through interactive web dashboards that allow test engineers to drill into specific events, review the underlying data, generate customer reports, and share findings across teams. Every output remains traceable to the source data.

IVEX says its platform has now accumulated over 100,000 kilometers (approximately 62,137 miles) of real-world driving data and has processed data from more than 50 vehicle models. The company holds six patents, including one in the United States, and is ISO 27001 certified for information security. Its on-road testing campaigns have operated in more than 20 countries, including EU member states, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Japan.

What the Series A Buys

The €5 million ($5.81 million) round — the company’s first Series A, bringing total disclosed funding past €6 million ($6.97 million) — will fund three priorities: deepening the platform’s coverage of NCAP protocols and associated data infrastructure; strengthening the engineering team; and establishing commercial and regulatory presence in North America and Asia.

The geographic expansion logic is straightforward. NHTSA in the United States is tightening validation requirements for autonomous vehicle deployments, and its FMVSS 127 regulation parallels elements of Europe’s GSR2 in mandating AEB performance for commercially sold vehicles. China — which IVEX is approaching through its existing relationship with SAIC, one of its current customers — is developing its own stringent ADAS testing and homologation frameworks as it seeks to bring credible international safety credentials to its fast-growing EV and ADAS ecosystem.

IVEX’s board has been strengthened alongside the funding round to support this expansion. Jan Leuridan, former CEO of Siemens Industry Software NV, joins alongside Omar Mohout, Director at Deloitte; Simon Alexandre, Partner at The Faktory; and co-founder Quentin de Clercq, who now leads AI strategy at ASML in the United States. The addition of Leuridan — whose Siemens background includes a prior partnership with IVEX — and de Clercq’s existing presence in the US market are meaningful signals for a company building toward North American market entry.

What Is SLIF and Why Is AI the Only Scalable Way to Score It?

Speed Limit Information Function, the ADAS feature that reads road signs and displays the applicable speed limit to the driver, seems straightforward — but validating it at Euro NCAP’s scale is not. A 2,000-kilometer (1,243-mile) test route across multiple countries can include thousands of individual speed limit signs: national limits, zone limits, variable message signs, temporary construction limits, electronically displayed limits that change with traffic conditions. For each sign, a compliant vehicle must detect the limit, update its display within the protocol’s tolerance, and maintain that reading until the next applicable change. Scoring all of this manually — watching hundreds of hours of camera footage, pausing to cross-reference dashboard readings, logging every sign and response — is the kind of work that defines engineering bottlenecks.

IVEX’s computer vision pipeline was built specifically for this problem. Its models are trained on real-world footage collected across the 20+ countries where the platform has operated, giving it exposure to the full range of sign standards, formats, and placement contexts encountered across European test routes. That training corpus — built from IVEX’s own on-road campaigns plus data from OEM and regulatory body partners — is the proprietary asset that underpins its accuracy claims and that an OEM building a competing tool from scratch would take years to replicate.

The Broader Market Signal

IVEX’s raise is part of a broader pattern of investment flowing into the infrastructure layer beneath the headline AV deployments. Valeo, one of the world’s largest Tier 1 automotive suppliers, reports that ADAS content in vehicles can grow up to ten times as systems move toward higher autonomy levels. Valeo itself has shipped over 1.5 billion ADAS sensors and expects to ship another 1.5 billion in the next five years. The validation burden attached to that production scale is substantial and growing.

UK-based ADAS testing supplier AB Dynamics, one of IVEX’s track-testing peers, has called the Euro NCAP 2026 overhaul one of the biggest protocol shifts in the rating scheme’s history. Both companies are benefiting from the same regulatory tailwind: as test complexity rises, so does demand for automated tools that can handle it at speed, with traceability, and in alignment with the specific mathematical requirements of the applicable protocol.

IVEX’s differentiation within this market is its specific position in the on-road regulatory scoring workflow — the place in the testing pipeline closest to the actual compliance determination, furthest from the controlled test-track conditions that prior-generation tools addressed. As Euro NCAP and NHTSA both push harder for real-world data to back up ratings and type approvals, that position becomes more structurally valuable, not less.

“Vehicle safety testing generates enormous amounts of data, but much of its analysis still depends on repetitive manual work,” CEO Mario Torres said in a statement. “AI and rigorous mathematical algorithms allow us to make the testing process significantly faster and more scalable while keeping engineers in control and ensuring that every result remains traceable to the original data.”

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does IVEX’s platform actually automate ADAS safety testing?

IVEX uses computer vision and cloud-based AI to process the camera footage, radar data, and vehicle telemetry generated during real on-road test campaigns. Instead of engineers manually watching hundreds of hours of driving video to identify speed limit signs and check whether the vehicle displayed them correctly, the platform does this automatically — detecting signs, reading dashboard displays, comparing responses against protocol tolerances, and generating scored results through an interactive dashboard. Engineers review the output and retain final sign-off, but the time-consuming analytical work is automated. According to IVEX, this reduces engineering analysis time by over 95 percent.

What is Euro NCAP’s 2026 protocol, and why does it matter for consumers?

Euro NCAP is the voluntary European car safety program whose five-star ratings most European car buyers use to compare vehicles. Its 2026–2028 overhaul is the most extensive protocol update since 2009: it restructures assessments across four phases — Safe Driving, Crash Avoidance, Crash Protection, and Post-Crash Safety — and more than doubles the number of individual test scenarios to over 1,200. New scenarios include head-on collision tests at closing speeds of up to 200 km/h (124 mph) and significantly expanded on-road evaluation of ADAS systems under real traffic conditions. For consumers, this means five-star-rated cars in the 2026 cycle will have been tested to a substantially higher and more realistic standard than those rated under prior protocols.

Why is IVEX expanding into North America if the Euro NCAP mandate is European?

Because ADAS compliance is becoming a global requirement, not a regional one. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s FMVSS 127 regulation establishes automatic emergency braking requirements for new US vehicles that parallel elements of Europe’s GSR2 framework. American automakers and their Tier 1 suppliers face their own growing validation burden as NHTSA tightens reporting requirements for autonomous vehicle deployments. Meanwhile, China — where IVEX already has a customer relationship with automaker SAIC — is building out its own ADAS homologation frameworks as Chinese EVs seek international credibility. IVEX’s regulatory foothold with Euro NCAP provides a transferable reference point as it enters these markets.

What does GSR2 Phase 3 actually require of carmakers, and how does that affect IVEX’s business?

GSR2 Phase 3, which entered force on July 7, 2026, tightened the performance requirements for Intelligent Speed Assist systems already mandated since 2022, added Advanced Driver Distraction Warning as a mandatory feature, and expanded the scope of pedestrian and cyclist Autonomous Emergency Braking requirements. For IVEX, every new mandatory ADAS feature is a new scoring requirement that needs to be evaluated in real-world conditions — which means more on-road test campaigns, more data to process, and more demand for automated tooling that can turn that data into regulation-aligned scores quickly and traceably.