Nexar, an Israeli mobile road safety app, was launched at the Code Conference in Los Angeles on May 27, with a $4 million funding round led by Aleph VC, with the participation of Jumpgate and Slow Ventures.
Nexar was co-founded by its CEO Eran Shir, the former manager of Yahoo’s Creation Innovation Center in Israel, and its CTO Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Yahoo’s former VP of Personalization and Platforms.
Nexar uses the power of crowdsourced feedback to detect real-time driving hazards and help prevent car accidents. The iPhone app alerts users when they’re near a dangerous driver, or coming into a dangerous intersection with limited visibility, providing immediate feedback to drivers nearby.
Nexar is different than typical GPS-reliant apps like Waze, the Google-owned navigation app that crowdsources driving data to show alerts for things like accidents and speed traps, says Re/Code. GPS hogs your smartphone’s battery; Nexar takes into account sensors like your phone’s gyroscope, accelerometer and compass and from that, interprets location data and other information, added Re/Code. According to Shir, this method reduces the amount of time and frequency that the app needs GPS. Nexar is free to download and use. It’s launching first in Los Angeles, as well as Tel Aviv, where the startup is based, and is currently only available on iOS.
Aleph VC, based in Tel Aviv, is a $140 million early stage venture capital fund founded in 2013 by Michael Eisenberg and Eden Shochat, focused on funding and helping Israeli entrepreneurs.
Eisenberg has been a key figure in Internet and software investing in Israel since 1995, playing a central role in the development of many of Israel’s leading companies and startups. Prior to founding Aleph, he was a General Partner at Benchmark from 2005-2013. Prior to that, he was a partner at Israel Seed Partners for eight years, and had joined Israel Seed in 1997 from Jerusalem Global.
Prior to co-founding Aleph, Shochat was a general partner at Genesis where he focused on seed-stage investments. Prior to that, he was a co-founder of face.com, a leader in web-scale face recognition in social networks, acquired by Facebook. He was also co-founder and CTO of Aternity.
Source: http://dealmakershub.com
