Roadbotics

RoadBotics and the Digitalization of Public Infrastructure

Managing civil infrastructure is one of the most expensive and highly unoptimized challenges facing governments worldwide. Historically, evaluating road conditions required municipalities to dispatch civil engineering crews in specialized vehicles to slowly drive miles of roadway, manually inspecting the pavement for cracks, potholes, and deterioration. This subjective, slow-moving process took months, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and resulted in outdated, siloed datasets. By the time a city identified a road in critical need of repair, the damage had worsened, dramatically inflating maintenance costs.

When we led RoadBotics' Seed round, we saw an exceptional application of physical AI that fundamentally turned this paradigm on its head.

Spun out of Carnegie Mellon University’s world-renowned Robotics Institute by co-founders Mark DeSantis, Dr. Christoph Mertz, and Dr. Benjamin Schmidt, RoadBotics took the same deep-learning computer vision models used to guide autonomous vehicles and applied them to public infrastructure. Instead of expensive, custom hardware, RoadBotics designed an elegant, cloud-based platform that transforms standard smartphone footage—captured passively from a vehicle dashboard—into highly advanced GIS maps. Their AI automatically identifies and rates 78 distinct types of pavement distress, giving civil engineers an objective, continuous snapshot of their entire road network.

We backed RoadBotics because they solved a high-stakes problem for the physical world by unlocking a completely passive data engine. Before our investment, the technology was largely academic; but quickly, RoadBotics achieved massive scale, helping over 250 local governments and massive global engineering firms dynamically prioritize their infrastructure budgets.

The Journey to Exit: RoadBotics' ability to bridge the gap between AI perception and massive physical logistics made them a prime target for strategic acquisition. RoadBotics was acquired by Michelin Group to integrate directly into MICHELIN DDi (Driving Data to Intelligence). By combining RoadBotics' powerful computer vision with Michelin's massive behavioral driving datasets, the acquisition established a global leader in predicting road safety hazards and near-miss root causes—underscoring Hyperplane's thesis that the most valuable AI companies are built by unlocking raw infrastructure data.

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