This Belgian AI Startup Just Raised $5.4M to Make Self-Driving Cars Safer

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-10

IVEX, a deep-tech startup spun out of KU Leuven in Heverlee, Belgium, just closed a $5.4 million Series A round. The company's mission? Make automotive safety testing faster, smarter, and way less painful. The round was backed by existing investors The Faktory and Dedicated.lu, along with a group of private investors. But the money is only part of the story. IVEX also beefed up its board with some serious industry heavyweights: Jan Leuridan, former CEO of Siemens Industry Software; Omar Mohout from Deloitte; Simon Alexandre of The Faktory; and co-founder Quentin de Clercq, who now leads AI strategy at ASML in the United States. They join CEO Mario Torres at the table. ### Why This Matters for the Future of Driving Here's the thing: modern vehicles are basically computers on wheels. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) tech generate mind-boggling amounts of data. Cameras, sensors, radar, lidar—all of it needs to be reviewed to make sure the car actually responds correctly to the world around it. Traditionally, engineers have had to manually scrub through hours of footage, spot road signs, check dashboard readings, and verify that the vehicle did what it was supposed to do. That approach doesn't scale. Not even close. As Torres puts it: "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." ### How IVEX Cuts Through the Noise IVEX uses computer vision, AI, and cloud-based data processing to automate the most tedious parts of on-road safety testing. The platform can simultaneously interpret the car's surroundings—speed limits, signs, road conditions—read the vehicle's displays, and compare multiple signals automatically. And it does this with a human-in-the-loop model. Engineers still review the output and make the final call. But the heavy lifting? Done in a fraction of the time. > "With this funding, we can deepen the capabilities of our platform and bring IVEX technology to North America and Asia." — Mario Torres, co-founder and CEO of IVEX The numbers speak for themselves. In one case, IVEX processed 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data in just 8 hours of engineering time. That's a time reduction of more than 95%. Imagine what that means for testing organizations trying to keep up with increasingly complex vehicle systems. ### The Bigger Picture IVEX isn't just building a tool. The company's long-term vision is to create the operating system for automotive safety testing—a platform where different safety protocols, testing requirements, and vehicle functions can run as applications. And the more data it processes, the smarter its models get, creating a continuously expanding foundation for future applications. With this fresh capital, IVEX plans to strengthen its position in Europe and make a serious push into North America and Asia. It also wants to bring its AI-powered testing tech to regulators, testing institutions, and automakers worldwide. Founded in 2018, IVEX is still relatively young. But with a $5.4 million war chest, a star-studded board, and a technology that can slash testing time by 95%, it's positioning itself as a key player in the race to make self-driving cars safer for everyone.