IVEX raises €5M Series A to scale AI-powered automotive safety testing globally

IVEX (Heverlee, Belgium) has raised €5 million in Series A funding from existing investors The Faktory and Dedicated.lu, alongside private investors, to accelerate the development of its AI-powered automotive safety testing platform and establish a presence in North America and Asia. Founded in 2018 as a spin-out from KU Leuven by Mario Torres and Quentin de Clercq, the company has built what it describes as the operating system for automotive safety testing.

The previous Seed round, closed in February 2023 and backed by PMV, SPDG, The Faktory, Noshaq, and Dedicated, funded the platform's initial commercial deployments. IVEX is now a trusted supplier to Euro NCAP, the European vehicle safety assessment programme whose ratings influence purchasing decisions across the continent, and has run on-road testing campaigns in more than 20 countries.

The problem IVEX is solving

Testing modern vehicles — particularly those equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems or autonomous driving capability — is a data problem at its core. An on-road assessment of whether a vehicle correctly identifies speed limits, reads road signs, tracks surrounding objects, and responds appropriately to each requires engineers to review camera footage, sensor data, and vehicle logs simultaneously and match the vehicle's response against the applicable safety protocol. That review cannot scale proportionally to the number of vehicles, test scenarios, or regulatory regimes.

IVEX's platform applies computer vision, AI, and cloud processing to automate the most repetitive parts of that analysis. The system simultaneously interprets the vehicle's environment, reads dashboard displays, compares signals, and produces structured output that engineers can review and validate. The company's stated efficiency figure is striking: 400 hours of multi-sensor driving data processed in 8 hours of engineering time, a 95%+ reduction in manual analysis. The human-in-the-loop model — engineers retain control over the final assessment and every result is traceable — is positioned as both a safety guarantee and a regulatory asset.

The platform has now accumulated more than 100,000 kilometres of driving data across more than 50 vehicle models, and holds six patents including one in the United States. The dataset compound effect is the structural moat: each deployment enriches the underlying models in ways a new entrant cannot replicate quickly.

The expansion logic

The Series A is primarily a geographic bet. IVEX's European business is established — Euro NCAP certification, deployments in 20+ countries, ISO 27001 status — and the immediate growth opportunity lies in markets where similar regulatory pressure is building: North America, Japan, Australia, and Brazil (all existing markets), and emerging Asian automotive testing regimes.

The board has been strengthened with appointments including Jan Leuridan, former CEO of Siemens Industry Software NV, and Omar Mohout, Director at Deloitte. Notably, Quentin de Clercq, IVEX's co-founder, now leads AI strategy at ASML in the United States — a structural connection to the semiconductor ecosystem that underpins automotive compute, though his day-to-day separation from IVEX operations is a variable to watch.

The long-term product vision — safety protocols, testing requirements, and vehicle-function tests running as applications on a shared IVEX infrastructure — is ambitious but coherent with the Euro NCAP relationship. If that relationship scales to Asian equivalents, the platform logic compounds.