Belgium spin-out IVEX raises €5M to cut car safety testing time, eyes US and Asia

IVEX, the Leuven startup that sells AI for car safety testing, has raised €5 million in Series A funding and wants to push into the US and Asia. The company says its system can cut the time engineers spend reviewing test footage by more than 95%, turning a job that once took 400 hours into one that takes eight, with human supervision still in the loop.

That matters because the volume of footage is rising fast. Cars now carry more cameras, radar devices and driver-assistance features, which means more scenes to inspect for things like sign recognition, braking, pedestrians and lane markings. IVEX’s pitch is simple: don’t hire an army of reviewers, shorten the hours each engineer has to burn through.

The round was backed by The Faktory, Dedicated.lu and several private investors. The money will go into broader NCAP coverage, more data infrastructure, and a commercial and regulatory push in North America and Asia. That comes as Euro NCAP is tightening its protocols for 2026 to 2028 and leaning harder on evidence from real-world driving.

IVEX was founded in 2018 by Mario Torres, Quentin de Clercq, Jeremy Schuermans and Tom Holvoet after Torres’s postdoctoral research at KU Leuven. The company says it already works in more than 20 countries and is trusted by Euro NCAP, which makes this less of a science project and more of a bid to become part of the testing plumbing. The catch is obvious: the firm now has to convince regulators outside Europe to trust AI-based assessments as much as Euro NCAP does.