Saudi’s Hazen.ai raises seven-figure seed to detect dangerous driving behavior through video analysis

Makkah-based traffic monitoring and analysis startup Hazen.ai has raised seed funding from Saudi Aramco’s VC arm Wa’ed, Wa’ed said in a statement to MENAbytes. The exact size of investment was not disclosed but we have been told that it’s a seven-figure USD deal.

Formally started in 2018 by Dr. Anas Basalamah, Dr. Saleh Basalamah, Muhammad Amin and Dr. Sohaib Khan, Hazen.ai is building traffic analytics and enforcement solutions based on deep learning and computer vision technologies. The startup uses regular CCTV cameras for traffic analysis instead of RADAR and LiDAR-based deployments that are relatively more expensive.

According to its website, Hazen’s software can detect violations like sudden lane changes, driving on shoulder, queue jumping, failure to yield, and illegal U-turns.

The startup that has built a video analysis engine based on deep learning algorithms detects vehicles in a video feed and extracts their trajectories for understanding road behavior.

Hazen’s solutions can currently be used for identifying traffic violations and counting traffic in real-time.

Muhammad Zeeshan, Investment Director, Waed Ventures, said, “Hazen.ai has an amazing team, products with communal benefits and a big market. It’s not only about financial returns but the huge wealth of data that the company can earn and leverage.”

The startup plans to use this first external funding round to further develop proprietary computer vision platform for traffic analytics, and to reach global markets.