The following interview is a conversation we had with Barry Lunn, CEO & Founder of Provizio, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11 Million Raised to Power the Future of Vehicle Safety
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines. Building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode.
Brett
Hey, everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Barry Lunn, CEO and Founder of Provizio, a vehicle safety platform that’s raised over 11 million in funding. Barry, welcome to the show.
Barry Lunn
Great to be here.
Brett
Super, super excited for our conversation, and let’s jump right in. Tell us about what you’re building today.
Barry Lunn
Yeah. So at Proviso, we’re building a radar based active safety technology, and the goal of that is to perceive and then predict and prevent automotive crashes. Right. Because we see that as being the safe path towards autonomy. So rather than trying to solve autonomy first and working back, we’re going the opposite direction. Let’s solve the crisis on the roads, and eventually that will lead to a safe path to autonomy.
Brett
And talk to us about what you were doing before this, because it doesn’t sound like this would be the first company that you ever start in your life. It seems like a very niche problem that I’m guessing there’s not a lot of people out there in the world thinking about. So talk to us about your career, everything you’re doing leading up to the point to uncovering this problem and deciding to launch a company.
Barry Lunn
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, you’re right. It’s not my first baby. You wouldn’t tackle this big a problem, I think, first time out. So I’ve started a bunch of companies. Primarily, I’ve worked in the high frequency electronics space, which largely means communications and radar. Right. And to be honest, most of my career, that was in the aerospace and defense industry. And then a number of years ago, I started working in the autonomous industry. Basically, the autonomous industry wanted this type of radar technology, imaging radar technology on vehicles to solve the problems they were having in making autonomy ubiquitous. And I guess it was in that space that I recognized how big this problem was.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
And I was used to selling, you know, tens and hundreds and thousands of units. But when you get into automotive, you’re talking millions and millions.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
And also, I started to see how big the car crash problem was. Right. We were brought in for the edge cases, as they called it, or the hard bit, as I call it. And I kind of recognized, hey, this could be more interesting. So after I sold my last company, I think were all focused on the wrong problem here in terms of autonomy. And I thought it’d be a hell of a lot more interesting to focus on preventing car crashes. And I thought autonomy will follow. And that was really the focus.
Brett
I’m based in San Francisco, as I mentioned, and there was kind of a critical moment in life a few weeks ago that just made me say, wow. And that was when my default for how I get around went from Uber to Waymo. And now whenever I go anywhere, my default is to go in this self driving car. And I feel totally comfortable with that. And it’s an awesome experience. What are your views when it comes to the state of self driving cars today?
Barry Lunn
Absolutely. I love the guys in Waymo, right. I’ve known them for a long time. And I’ve known for a long time that they were kind of in a category of one when it came to actual autonomous vehicles. Right. You’ve had that experience. When you have that experience, you realize the amount of work these guys have put in to get to there. Waymo weren’t in a hurry. They didn’t take any shortcuts. They weren’t looking to raise billions and trick some investors into putting it in. They just went at this slowly, bite by bite. And I think that was really important. But they also have the issue of, you have it in San Francisco, but it’s not everywhere, right? So it’s not going to. Waymo isn’t going to solve car crashes overnight.
Barry Lunn
So what we’re looking at doing is we know what it takes because Waymo proven it. The level of perception that you need. And really what we’re looking at is the next generation. Now we’ve got to get that technology, which is obviously expensive and quite large on the vehicle and making that ubiquitous, getting that into every vehicle. And I think that’s the big thing we’re focused on right now, delivering way more safety for everyone. And I think if we can achieve that’s awesome.
Brett
From a regulatory perspective, how do you think that should be handled? So obviously there was that big situation. I don’t know, I’ll probably get it wrong, but it’s three to six months ago where cruise had that accident. It really wasn’t a cruise related accident. I think a human drunk driver hit a person, they fell into cruises lane and then the cruise car hit them. And I believe the California DMV suspended them. And I don’t see cruise going around California or at least San Francisco anymore. How should we be thinking about this? Or how should people be thinking about this from a regulatory perspective when those types of things happen? Should we shut everyone down?
Barry Lunn
Or.
Brett
What are your thoughts there?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, I think that case was almost why we set up the company. We could see that this was going to happen because the focus is, I mean, you know, 1.25 million people are killed on our roads every year, right? 50 million people are maimed by vehicles every year. This isn’t a new problem, and it’s certainly not one being caused by autonomous vehicles. Right. But we knew that as soon as you turned on a level of autonomy, the focus and the scrutiny was going to be higher, and rightly so. Right now, there’s a machine involved here. And I think those types of things have really brought the scrutiny into the regulator. So I’m a huge fan of regulation. I know that’s not a popular thing to say in America, but when it comes to people’s lives, I’m a big fan of regulation.
Barry Lunn
What I’m really excited by actually right now is NHTSA just very recently announced FMVSS 127. It just rolls off the tone. Right. But what’s really important about that, for the first time in history, right, in the United States, it’s not whether you want to put something on or active safety is mandatory from 2029. You cannot build a vehicle and sell it in the United States without technology that would prevent an awful lot of crashes. That’s an incredible development. And that’s almost come from the focus because the fact that you have autonomous vehicles has pointed out to people, okay, here are where the issues are, but also that it’s possible to have way less crashes. And so I’m really excited about that. Europe has done some incredible regulation as well.
Barry Lunn
There’s now robotics in every single vehicle that’s sold in Europe right now that can recognize road signs to slow down cars, all of that. So it’s all starting to seep in. So I guess as a guy who started a company five years ago saying all this would happen. And by the way, this is at a time when, you know, Tesla was at the peak of the hype of, oh, they’re going to have autonomy tomorrow with vision only. This is really positive. I’m really happy to see, you know, regulation come in here and take control.
Brett
And not to wed you in a bad spot here, but my wife and I were recently having a debate. We just had our first child a couple of weeks ago, and were talking about, do we think that she’s ever going to have a driver’s license and she’s going to be driving a vehicle. So that would be 1617 years in the future. Where do you stand there? Do you think that youth today and people being born today are going to be driving, or is it going to be all autonomous?
Barry Lunn
I think there’s a combination of answers to that. I think we’ll be mostly autonomous just purely because of ethics, because I do believe we’re going to get to a place where the machine is better driver than human drivers. And in that case, you know, ethics will determine that humans shouldn’t be driving, right. So I think that’s one part of it. But I also think there will be a hell of a lot less cars, right. Because as soon as you take away our love affair and our ownership of cars and you start to bring in autonomy, people would realize that cars aren’t the most efficient way of doing an awful lot of things. Right. And, you know, as a European we see in Ireland is very car dependent, very much like the US.
Barry Lunn
But, you know, I’ve lived across Europe, and when you have really good public transport infrastructure and things like that, you discover very quickly that actually cars have a very limited space where they’re really valuable. So I’m hoping that your child and my children as well, will have far less power dependency. And when they do that, it’ll be a hell of a lot safer, probably not under a license that they got tested for.
Brett
Well, we can wrap up this interview now. You just validated my point and what I was trying to say to her. So thank you for settling that. I’ll now reference you here as the expert that we brought in to settle the debate.
Barry Lunn
Yeah, I’ve been solving marriage crisis for years now.
Brett
You know, normally we have companies on and they’re building cybersecurity technology or they’re building developer tools or retail technology. And we asked them, how long did it take you from founding the company to the day you started generating revenue. And for a lot of them, it’s fast. It’s three months, six months, nine months, they have revenue coming in. Given what you’re building, I’m guessing that’s not the case. I’m guessing there’s a lot of building that has to happen before you can ever really start selling it. What’s that look like for you? And can you just shed some light on that?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, absolutely. Look, we’re a deep tech company and it’s pretty understood that if you’ve got to build some deep tech, it’s going to take a while so you can add value, right? And to be fair, I’ve been building dtechem companies for quite a long time. With my last deep tech company, I was able to get revenue straight away. Because you can always offer a service, right? If you do good stuff, you can always do things for people in your space. I was really keen to avoid that in proviso because we had such a big, complex problem to solve. I didnt want to be chasing revenue to go and solve that. So we basically took a decision, we are not going to take any revenue because youd be surprised, you do get offered it because all those guys trying to solve hard problems.
Barry Lunn
And we got a really good team right through the stack from perception, AI, machine learning, people load level, shift design and things like that. So there’s always people looking for your resources. And we’ve resisted that over the years, which was really important. So it took about three years, I say, until we got to a place where we had a product, our first kind of PoC type product that people could pay for. And then we got them paying, right. Because I think a big mistake that an awful lot of deep tech startups make is they never ask a customer to pay, right. But I’m around too long to think that people have no money, and especially in automotive, because the companies are so big, right, like automotive car makers, but also the tier one suppliers. Car makers are often bigger than the car maker, right?
Barry Lunn
And so these guys are kind of used to getting whatever they want because people just give them samples, leave them all of that. But to be fair, we found them pretty good. They understand we’ve got to survive. And it’s one thing I’ve found is one great way of validating whether a customer really is interested in what you’re doing or not. If they actually put their hand in their pocket and pay for something. So we always expect something at this stage because we add a ton of value when we do things. So even in pocs, for example, sometimes it’s not revenue, sometimes it’s data sharing. Data is the new oil, and we have some partners that we don’t charge them for sensors, but we do charge them a data.
Barry Lunn
They send us back the data that they collect and then we mine that and then we’re able to sell that to other people.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
So we’ve learned how valuable that data can be. So I think we got a good balance of kind of paying customers, but not being subservient to revenue. But of course that meant raising more money. Right.
Brett
What about from a marketing perspective and a go to market perspective, what does that look like? What’s the strategy there?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, so we license our technology to basically automotive suppliers and that allows them to deliver better performance in a smaller form factor, lower cost. So there’s like a total wins in what we do. But probably the most important thing we have done in terms of that business model is adopting that licensed business model. And I think there’s two aspects to that, right. It has meant that we’ve shown confidence in our ip, right. If you’re going to license your technology, you got to believe in your ip, right. Because otherwise people can nick it, right. So that was the first thing that we knew were adding a ton of value. A lot of startups cover stuff up and keep it to themselves and put it in a black box because they don’t actually have anything unique. We’re pretty confident in that.
Barry Lunn
So that’s why we license our technology. But the big thing it does is that just opens up so many more customers, right. And it turns most of our potential competitors into customers, right. Because we’re not saying, hey, you can only buy a perception radar from us, we’re saying you can buy perception radar from us. Or if you’re already supplying radars to half the automakers in the world, you can license our technology. And together we will provide radars to half the people in the world. So that’s really our focus. That is game changer. Once we identified that this show is.
Brett
Co. What’s your biggest challenge right now? If you think about from a go to market perspective, what keeps you up at night or what’s top of mind maybe is a better way to ask that, just in case you’re a good sleeper.
Barry Lunn
Yeah. It’s partnerships, right. It’s making the right partnerships because we do have a compelling technology, and you’re always trying to find that space between the person who has the biggest share of the market and the person that could be the best for your company. And they’re not always the same thing. Right. And you have to be quite strategic here. And a lot of that, those involved, either knowing who you’re getting into bed with or knowing someone who knows them, that can tell you what that’s going to be like, because especially in automotive, it’s a bit like getting into a marriage. Right? Partnerships are long, right? Because time cycles in automotive are long. So if you’re pony enough with a tier one, you want to trust them. You want to understand that they’re going to deliver, not just for them.
Barry Lunn
It’s not just about them having. Selling millions of radars or selling lots of perception, but actually, are they going to be the right match? And especially we’re so aligned. Is the OEM, is the car manufacturer going to have a good experience with these guys? You know what I mean? We don’t want to get to a place where everyone loves proviso, but the guys we partnered up with, they really don’t like, and so we don’t have the impact we want. So I suppose that is the bit that keeps me awake. It’s a nice thing. We’re very lucky in that pretty much all the top tier ones are talking to us right now. Right. So we do have. We’re having a bit of a pageant right now where we’re kind of going, right, who are actually the best partners for us long term.
Brett
It kind of makes me think about some of the conversations I’ve had with companies that are selling into pharma and life sciences. They say it’s incredibly hard to get in, but once you’re in, you are in, and it’s very hard to take you out. Is it something similar, it sounds like?
Barry Lunn
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. And very similarly, that also leads to hesitancy on the other side. And especially with a startup, they do want to know you’re going to be around. And I think that’s another important part of our licensed business model. We were lucky in that we just watched the Lidar market grow. We started the company because we thought Lidar was going to fail, and now it’s failing. We got to watch what happens when startups think they can just be a tier one. They can be, you know, go toe toe with a company with a 45 billion turnover. I’m sorry, like, I just don’t believe that story. You know what I mean? I don’t care how much money is in the market, I just don’t believe that. And that was a big thing.
Barry Lunn
We got to learn from that and go, no, let’s license, let’s partner with these guys, let everyone be comfortable that we’re going to be here for the long term.
Brett
What about fundraising?
Brett
What have you learned throughout this journey? And given that it’s deep tech, it takes a long time, how do you attract investors and get investors on board to be in it for the long haul?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, fundraising is the usual thing with fundraising. If you don’t need any money, fundraising is really easy. Right. And the other thing, I think not being a first time Founder also helps.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
So having delivered returns for investors, especially in the early stages, that really blows our core surroundings. Right. Like not every investor that came in quite like believed me because again, everything that we’re reading was saying, hey, we’re going to have autonomy tomorrow and it’s going to be vision based and things like that. So it was quite interesting in that regard. But I do believe like, you have to get the story and the validation. Right. And then fundraising is fine. Right. But if you’re not ready or you’re not clear on your go to market how it’s going to be and there isn’t someone that you’re doing it or someone at the other end of the line that’s going to go, yeah, this is true, this is real, then fundraising is going to be really tough. Right.
Barry Lunn
And I mean, even at my stage, having fundraising throughout, like six different companies are that way so far right now. Took me a long time to recognize that going to the market a little too early and then just having a long and momentum closes funding rounds, as you know. Right. And so you dont want to have a long fundraise. So I think thats really it. And the other is obviously understanding the market.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
There was no point last year going out to market to raise 50 million. So you do have to read the tea leaves and understand when and how I think.
Brett
And correct me if Im wrong, I believe I saw online that the first company you founded was in 2010. Whats the biggest difference between the founding of that company and this one? Just in terms of the different environment, not just from a fundraising perspective, but from a technology perspective all around, whats the biggest difference between those two experiences?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, no, its interesting actually. And I do kind of look at these types of things quite a bit, right, because I think as well, even with the fundraising thing, right, like people think its tight now, but it was really tight back in 2010, right? Like a lot tighter than it is now. It’s just people are only comparing it to more recent years when things were a bit frothy. I like where we’re at now, right? I like these cycles in markets. I’ve been doing this since like 2000, right? So I’m 20 plus years building companies at this stage. I’ve never liked hype cycles, I’ve never liked that part. Nothing makes sense to me, you know, I like to keep things simple. I like to understand, I add value, therefore I will make money and therefore my shareholders will make money in frauding type environments.
Barry Lunn
I think all that goes out the window and I’m really not comfortable in that. So we actually could have raised a ton more money two years ago. We had a very exciting story and we had a bunch of kind of partners coming in who were top of the hype cycle as well and we chose not to. And it was because I didn’t know what I was going to do with the money and that’s really dangerous, right? Whereas now we know exactly what we’re going to do with every penny that we raise and we have a very clear path. So I think that to me and economics, you know, and I hear startups complaining about like investors want to see revenues and I’m like going, well, what the hell are we here for, right?
Barry Lunn
Like that’s, you know, one one of building a company is, you know, make money and make a profit that could be unique. And so, yeah, I like where it is right now.
Brett
Final question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like here?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, so those are the exact time horizons you have to have in automotive, right? So we’re in production in that time horizon, right? So that’s millions of units, right? That’s where we’re at. That’s kind of how we’re thinking now. That’s what we’re preparing for and that’s what we’re getting into these partnerships for. So that’s our technology in millions and millions of vehicles around the world, right? And growing from there. Like, I mean, taking the ten year time horizon, I want our technology to be ubiquitous. So in ten years time it will be as ludicrous for you to get in a vehicle without a safety belt as it would be getting a vehicle without proviso technology. And I firmly believe that’s going to happen.
Brett
I look forward to that day. Before I get into any vehicle, I’m going to ask for some proof here. Whose technology is behind this.
Barry Lunn
Absolutely. You know what? The regulators are going to do it for us. That’s what I’m most excited by. The regulators have had enough. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Barry, this has been so much fun. Really appreciate you coming on and chatting and solving the debate between my wife and I about what the future of driving is going to look like. This has been a blast. Anyone who wants to follow along with your journey, where should they go? Are you active on LinkedIn? Should they just go to the website? Where’s the best place for them to follow you and watch your experience or follow along with experience?
Barry Lunn
Yeah, Brett, and thank you for having me. It’s been so much fun. LinkedIn. I’m most active on LinkedIn.
Brett
Right.
Barry Lunn
And we post up white papers and little sneak previews on LinkedIn quite a bit. Of course, we have the website, which is provizio.ai, that obviously update as well. But yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to come and chat.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you again, Barry, and wish you best of luck.
Barry Lunn
Thanks, Brett. Really appreciate it.
Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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