Velodyne Lidar has acquired Bluecity, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence (AI) software company, in an all-stock transaction. The addition of Bluecity is expected to be immaterial to operating expenses and cash usage. Bluecity’s executive, software development and sales teams will join Velodyne.

Velodyne and Bluecity have been partnering for many years to deliver lidar-based solutions for smart city applications. Velodyne’s Intelligent Infrastructure Solution (IIS) combines the company’s award-winning lidar sensors and Bluecity’s AI software.

IIS delivers traffic monitoring and analytics to improve road safety and efficiency, and helps cities plan for smarter, greener transportation systems. The solution is deployed across four continents with 74 installations, including systems rolled out domestically in California, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, Maryland, Texas, Nevada and Michigan and internationally in Canada, China, UAE, India, Finland, Germany and Australia.

Velodyne Lidar and Bluecity Intelligent Infrastructure Solution installed in San Jose, California

Velodyne will continue to expand its Intelligent Infrastructure Solution’s capabilities, including monitoring flows of people and vehicles to create a range of new full-stack infrastructure solutions for applications such as parking, retail, casinos and stadiums.

According to Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group, the smart infrastructure market for lidar will grow from $108M in 2021 to $1.1B in 2027. To serve these growing markets, Velodyne will integrate Bluecity’s AI and analytics software, delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, with Velodyne’s Vella lidar perception software. This integration will facilitate the creation of new Velodyne lidar-based software solutions for industrial, robotics and intelligent infrastructure, enabling the acceleration of customers’ time to market with autonomous vision systems for these markets.

Vella software translates lidar data into actionable information so that autonomous systems can observe and understand the environments they are operating in. Vella’s real-time data enables autonomous systems to make decisions and take action, such as a robot or vehicle moving safely, and provide analytics, for example a traffic solution helping communities understand root causes of near-miss collisions, red light running and other road user behavior.