Meet Andrew Fleury, CEO & Co-Founder at Computer Vision & AI Micromobility Startup: Luna

Luna is a whose mission is to make micromobilty safer for riders and pedestrians. When fitted to an e-scooter or e-bike, Luna’s device enables it to “see” and recognise its environment, whether it is being ridden in a pedestrian zone, or a footpath, or whether it is in the line of travel of a pedestrian or object.

Luna then communicates with the scooter or bike, enabling shared operators to control what mode of action to take next. In the case of an imminent collision with an object or pedestrian, the scooter or bike could be instantly and automatically stopped or slowed. In the case of a rider mounting a footpath, the scooter could also be slowed or stopped, or the operator could instead choose to send a text or email to the rider to issue a warning, or fine.

Luna also provides an AI-based parking selfie solution, which gives irrefutable visual proof of correct parking before a rider ends their journey. Finally, because this is a camera based technology, there are essentially limitless smart city insights which can be derived from the data, though as a European company our solution is data privacy sensitive with facial and licence plate blurring built in as standard.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Myself and the team had been working in the rather niche space of smart vehicles and telematics for 15 years through a previously founded company. When micromobility first hit our streets en masse in 2019, there were an abundance of well-publicised issues such as footpath riding, street clutter etc. We began to realise that many of the safety technologies we had created for different vehicle types such as public sector and airport ground service vehicles could be applied to solve these problems.

Operators largely rely on outdated GPS solutions to manage their scooter fleets. However, a big challenge for GPS accuracy in city environments are tall buildings – the “urban canyon” effect. Instead, with Luna we have come up with a ground-based smart camera solution which provides irrefutable visual proof of scooter or bike location and therefore a much higher level of control for operators.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Few sectors move as fast as micromobility. The tech requirements of the shared, but also the consumer market are also evolving at lightning pace. When we started out, there were only maybe a handful of micromobility adjacent tech companies. In just two years, this has grown exponentially, driven by the changing needs of operators as they discover new challenges in city environments.

While our first focus is solving sidewalk riding, collisions and disorderly parking, the kinds of algorithms we are producing for the sector will continue to evolve in parallel with the safety needs of the sector as it continues to scale globally.

What can we hope to see from Luna in the future?

Our mission is to help micromobility become a safer, more trusted form of transport, in order to reduce the number of cars on our roads. We believe AI and computer vision will play an integral role to make it a safer experience – not only for riders but also pedestrians. With major operators such as Lime recently announcing their own version of the technology, these solutions are no longer emerging technologies, limited to city pilots and trials, but will be a regular feature in the very near future.

We’re looking forward to seeing the tech proven en masse and to being a dominant supplier to the market – included on one million e-scooters and e-bikes by 2025.

 

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