This month, infrastructure engineering software provider Bentley Systems announced the acquisition of Blyncsy, a provider insights, powered by AI and machine learning, for departments of transportation to support operations and maintenance activities. The acquisition was completed by Bentley’s iTwin Ventures, the company’s corporate venture capital fund.
Blyncsy, as noted, specializes in providing key insights to departments of transportation regarding roads and other assets around roadways. The company, which was founded in 2014, has two main offerings to their customers. One is Pulse, which is a real-time traffic monitoring system which collects data from advanced movement sensors.
More relevant to this acquisition, though, is seemingly their Payver offering. Payver utilizes imagery coming from dash cams on cars driving down a roadway, and uses artificial intelligence to automatically segment footage to identify assets like signs, guardrails, streetlights, and more. Imagery from the dash cams are uploaded in real-time, and after the assets are identified through machine learning algorithms, Payver rates the quality of the assets. From there, DOTs can receive a report of assets which may need attention, with flags for things like cracks in roads, damaged guardrails, and more. Per the announcement of this acquisition, Blyncsy can detect over 50 different roadway safety issues.
In a press statement, Hawaii Department of Transportation Director Ed Sniffen said of the company’s offerings, “Safety is our first priority, and operational efficiency is a high number 2. We depend on real-time data, like the information we receive from Blyncsy, to proactively manage the highway system to be as safe and reliable as possible. HDOT embraces technology that enables us to run in the most productive manner possible. Blyncsy gets us weekly reports with graphics and photos detailing guardrail, roadway, and vegetation conditions that provide more tools to allow us to prioritize our resources to address the needs of the system.”
As a result of this acquisition, Blyncsy will adopt Bentley’s iTwin Platform for integration with owners’ engineering and simulation models, while Bentley will incorporate and bring to market Blyncsy’s AI services within its emerging mobility digital twin offerings.
Looking specifically at the United States, infrastructure is top of mind for people all around the country, and DOTs are looking for new solutions given an influx of funding from legislation and aging infrastructure to deal with. That includes things like bridges and dams, as we’ve previously covered, as well as roads that millions of people use every day. Traditionally, workflows to monitor the status of various roadside assets – not to mention the roads themselves – required either a tremendous amount of manhours to manually check these things, or expensive capture equipment. Blyncsy works to counteract both of those issues, and is now part of the leading digital infrastructure ecosystem with Bentley and its iTwins platform.
Blyncsy CEO and founder Mark Pittman said of the acquisition, “Blyncsy is committed to applying the latest AI and machine learning techniques to benefit transportation networks. This alignment with Bentley will only strengthen the value to our users and together we will provide even deeper asset analytics to transportation owners, to support the drivers of today and tomorrow.”
Bentley’s iTwin Ventures managing executive, Mike Schellhase, added, “Blyncsy came to our attention for potential participation in a successive VC investment round. But we were so convinced of the significance of their breakthrough that we undertook its outright acquisition, in order to scale it rapidly and pervasively. We expect investments in widespread asset analytics to accelerate leveraging infrastructure digital twins.”
