- IVEX has raised €5 million in its Series A round to take its car safety-testing AI to the US and Asia.
- The Leuven-based startup claims its platform reduces the time engineers spend on testing by more than 95%.
- IVEX is currently a supplier trusted by Euro NCAP and operates in more than 20 countries.
Previously, engineers would spend 400 hours examining a single batch of footage from vehicle safety tests, looking at things such as speed sign recognition and braking. IVEX states that its software can carry out the same kind of review in just eight hours, with human supervision applied to each result.
The company, based in Leuven, has raised €5 million in its Series A funding round to introduce its solution to regulators and car manufacturers in the US and Asia.
The Faktory, Dedicated.lu and a number of private investors have supported this funding round. The money is being invested at a time when Europe’s Euro NCAP safety programme is introducing more stringent protocols for the period 2026 to 2028, protocols which place greater emphasis on evidence from real-world driving.
“Vehicle safety testing generates enormous amounts of data, but much of its analysis still depends on repetitive manual work. 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,” said Mario Torres, co-founder and CEO of IVEX.
In 2025, the global market for automotive testing and validation services was valued at $17.9 billion and is expected to reach $32.4 billion by 2033. With vehicles being fitted with an increasing number of cameras, radar devices and driver-assistance features, the quantity of footage that needs to be checked for safety is constantly increasing.
Human inspection cannot keep pace with this demand. IVEX intends to address the problem by reducing the number of hours each engineer works, rather than by recruiting more staff.
From a KU Leuven lab to Silicon Valley
Torres founded the company in 2018 with researchers Quentin de Clercq, Jeremy Schuermans, and Tom Holvoet after completing his postdoctoral research on safety validation at KU Leuven. Quentin de Clercq currently heads the AI strategy at ASML in the United States but remains a member of IVEX’s board.
The company uses computer vision and cloud-based data processing to interpret both road events and dashboard information. It verifies whether the vehicle has recognised signs, pedestrians, or lane markings and has reacted in accordance with safety rules.
This approach is referred to by IVEX as human-in-the-loop: the software identifies the results, but an engineer must approve each decision to ensure that every conclusion can be traced back to the original sensor data.
IVEX is entering a competitive market. Applied Intuition, a leading simulation company based in the Silicon Valley area, had a market value of $15 billion following a funding round of $600 million in June 2025 and is currently ahead in the field of virtual testing of autonomous systems. Foretellix, an Israeli company that provides scenario testing and is supported by Nvidia and Temasek, has raised more than $135 million in order to test driving systems using simulated edge cases. Kognic, a Swedish company, has raised approximately $43 million to label the sensor data used to train these systems.
Although most competing companies focus on the early stages of testing, IVEX carries out its work later in the process, converting real recordings from public roads into scores that regulators can use, with Euro NCAP as its primary customer.
The funding, the board and the open questions
The funding obtained will be used to expand the platform’s coverage of NCAP protocols, expand the data infrastructure, and establish a regulatory and commercial presence in North America and Asia.
In 2020, IVEX raised approximately €1.2 million in a seed round with PMV, Noshaq, The Faktory, and others, and then, in February 2023, secured an undisclosed seed round extension, which brought SPDG and Dedicated on board as investors. With the new Series A, the total amount of disclosed funding has now exceeded €6 million.
The Faktory’s portfolio also contains e-peas, a Belgian chip startup that completed a $19 million Series C in 2024, demonstrating the fund’s dedication to long-term deep-tech investments.
IVEX thinks that almost the entire process could be automated, provided that there is still human supervision. The key challenge in carrying out this kind of expansion is whether regulators in the United States and Asia will place as much trust in AI-based assessments as Euro NCAP does.
