Barry Lunn opens up his laptop in my back garden and shows me a sneak peek of his new business. Called Provizio, it is trying to solve a problem that sadly takes more than one million lives a year, and costs economies trillions of dollars: road deaths.

The Limerick-born entrepreneur, who turned 42 this year, is trying to stop road deaths using the kind of advanced technology used to fire missiles, land spaceships on other planets, and keep satellites in the air.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had barely heard of Lunn. But as he takes me though his plans, it becomes obvious that this is one of the most ambitious businesses – and ambitious entrepreneurs – I have ever encountered.

Lunn has pedigree. He is a veteran of half-a-dozen tech businesses and has closed deals from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen with everyone from space agencies to Chinese conglomerates. Three years ago, Lunn was reported to have sold his last business for $50 million to a Hong Kong consortium. He still won’t confirm the price-tag, but he doesn’t deny it was in that region either.

Lunn arrived at our meeting driving a slick black electric BMW. We talk about its safety features – they are among the most advanced available in commercial cars in the world, with an array of sensors and cameras to make it safer. Yet, Lunn maintains this is just the tip of what could be done.

After 20 years selling and building high frequency radars, Lunn believes the solution to road deaths is to develop a car that can see its environment far better than any human. “We want to use advanced technology to create an accident prevention platform that uses proprietary vision sensors and machine learning to allow cars see further, wider and through obstacles,” Lunn says.

Lunn is convinced that the race by companies such as Elon Musk’s Tesla to develop cars that can drive themselves is the wrong one. Instead, he argues that the world’s car companies should focus on crash prevention by refining sensor technology that already exists in other fields. This, he says, is better than spending tens of billions of dollars taking the human entirely out of driving. 

“Human error causes 90 per cent of car accidents. Over 1.35 million people are killed every year on the road, plus 50 million people injured at a cost of $24 trillion,” Lunn says.

“It is the equivalent of 2 per cent of world GDP. We’ve put tens of billions into trying to develop autonomous cars and advanced driver assistance systems… with very little impact on road deaths.”

According to Lunn, even the best drivers can only control their own actions, not the cars around them. Lunn shows me a video of a car driving, sending out radar pulses far ahead of it. The pulses flow around obstacles letting the car see further, and in all directions at once. Things like fog, snow or rainfall become irrelevant as the car’s sensors slice through it.

Most drivers today, Lunn says, have just one second to react to say the car slamming on the brakes in front of them. “We want to get to 16 seconds,” Lunn says. “Above 10 second reaction times is critical to preventing accents.”

How do you do that? “You need to know your entire environment in three dimensions first. You need to know the velocity of every object in that environment. You need to know what speed it is moving and in what direction. That is the 4th dimension. The fifth dimension is perception being able to predict where everything is going to go next and what is going to happen and take the correct responsive action,” he says.

“Provizio is working on a five-dimension sensory vision system that prevents accidents, optimises safety and saves lives. The focus in car manufacturers has largely been on reactive or prescriptive safety measures, these merely minimise damage to passengers, they don’t stop the crash from occurring.”

This is the pitch that Lunn has driven up from Limerick to tell me about over a coffee in the garden of my home in Dublin just before lockdown prevented such journeys.

How on earth can Barry Lunn hope to solve the kind of difficult problem he is describing? To understand that, you must understand his own extraordinary story.

Dyslexic, Lunn dropped out of school, twice

Barry Lunn grew up in a village called Caherconlish near Limerick as one of five children. “For our way that’s not big,” Lunn laughs. “My wife was one of eight!”

He went to secondary school in CBS Sexton Street at the back of the train station in Limerick city. The school’s most famous past pupil is the billionaire JP McManus, who today funds a scholarship programme for the school to allow its best students go on to third level deucation.

Lunn attended the school in the 1980s and early 1990s before this came in. He was dyslexic but at the time this wasn’t really understood. He ended up dropping out from school, twice. By fifth year he was gone entirely.

Lunn wanted to do his Leaving Cert and asked two different schools if he could sit his exams with them. “I said I can’t do classes. I need to do it on my own sort of thing and in fairness to them they let me do it,” Lunn recalled. “I sat my leaving cert between the two schools.”

Lunn excelled in maths, applied maths, art and physics but struggled with languages.

“I would have drawn pictures in my actual answers in my Irish exam, because that is how I thought,” he said.

In 1996 he got his Leaving Cert and he put down Engineering in the University of Limerick but he also applied for the Limerick School of Art and Design.

“I felt for the first time like I knew where I was going.”

Barry Lunn

Lunn had enough points to study either course, but he went with art in the end. “My mother must be the only woman in Ireland who let her son do art rather than engineering,” Lunn said. “In fairness the poor woman was after having me leave school twice, so she said if it makes you happy do it.”

How did Lunn develop an interest in art? “I would have been getting in trouble in school. One day, I was doing graffiti and the teacher said right come on you’re coming with me,” Lunn recalled. “He didn’t bring me to the principal. He brought me to the art teacher instead who kind of took me on as a bit of a pet project. He would let me come in after school to classes and in the end, I did art in the Leaving.”

Lunn learned about sales at that time from his father, who managed a clothes shop. After school Lunn worked in the shop and saw how his father treated people. “My father loved being with the public, and it was in the shop that I learned about sales,” Lunn said. “There is nothing like working with the public to learn how to sell.”  

In art college Lunn dreamed about being a painter, but he found he didn’t have the patience. “I never even submitted my canvases. I broke both of them over my knees,” he said. Instead Lunn found himself drawn more towards graphic design. As a child he used to take things apart in his home to try and work out how they operated.

“I got into design and I just loved it. It was a place where you could match the two sides of the brain,” he said. By the late 1990s, Lunn had started to code and build websites. After third year he spent a year working in Australia with his then girlfriend Shelly (now wife) and came back invigorated. “I felt for the first time like I knew where I was going.”

But where was that?

Solving problems with the Sugrue brothers

Soon after college, Barry Lunn met two unusual and successful entrepreneurs called Denis and Owen Sugrue. The two brothers from Salthill in Galway were proteges of Dr Ed Walsh, who had come home after a brilliant career in America where he had been director of the energy research laboratory at Virginia Tech. Walsh had been charged with setting up an “Irish MIT” by the then government, which later became the University of Limerick. The Sugre brothers emerged from this technically creative milieu.

The two brothers co-founded a company called Interpro Systems in 1981. By 1985 it had had sales of £1.5 million supplying power supply testing equipment to computer makers. It was an exciting time for the West and South West with big names like Wang, IBM, Philips, and Apple setting up shop. Interpro started to supply these kinds of companies with electronic test systems and soon it employed about 40 people.

Unusually for an Irish company at the time, the two young Sugrue brothers had managed to attract venture capital from a French fund called Soffinivo, a British company called Alta Berkley and Jim Flavin’s DCC. The Irish Times quoted Denis Sugrue as saying the business had become profitable after just one year’s trading.

The Sugrue brothers then sold this business to a Swiss multinational called Schaffner in 1991. By 2000 the brothers were ready to go again with a new venture. Eoin Sugrue had been living in the South of France while Denis Sugrue was based in Moscow. “I was basically employee number one in their new company,” Lunn recalled. The new venture was called Amideon Systems.

“When the Sugrues were building their first company it was all about hardware,” Lunn said. “They realised that was very hard, and that you needed to employ hundreds of people to build complex hardware for places like the aerospace industry.

“They decided to let someone else do that. ‘We will own the front-end. We will own what the customer sees.’”

Lunn, with his talent for design and figuring things out, was hired to help them create a device foundry of sorts, which would work out how to solve problems by combining technology that already existed or adapting it to new needs.

Amideon carved out a business in niche areas like microwave security systems, parts that were usable in space, radio frequency and microwave testing, telecoms, and other high-tech areas. It custom designed products and specialised in project management, procurement and intellectual property sourcing.

Governments, the military, aerospace, security, telecoms and other big businesses in often far flung spots used it.

“The boys took me on and it went from there. We all got on,” Lunn said. “Our main market would have been Russia and then we expanded into China as well. After that it was weird places… like we were Ireland’s number one exporter to Uzbekistan.”

Amideon grew and grew. By 2001 it had sales of €5 million, and after that it kept growing until it reached annual sales of between €20 million and €25 million. Amideon had offices in Russia, Turkey, China, South Korea, Ireland, France, Germany and the US. Everything was going great – until the FBI came calling.

“The Russians are coming” – Time Magazine

In January 2005 Denis Sugrue was sitting in a plane at 5 pm in the afternoon preparing to take off from Los Angeles International Airport back to Dublin. Four armed FBI agents came on board waving an arrest warrant, handcuffed him and then led him away.

Denis Sugrue was accused of being a Russian agent and arrested at Los Angeles airport for “attempting to export defence articles without required licence”. Barry Lunn wasn’t with his friend on the flight, but he had been with him on only the previous trip.

“Denis is one of the point zero per cent of people arrested by the FBI who are not convicted of anything,” Lunn said.

The arrest made world headlines. Time magazine ran an article about it called “The Russians are coming.” Sugrue was, according to the best-selling magazine, one of an “army of spooks in the US”. Newsweek declared his arrest a breakthrough in halting Russian espionage.

“I discovered after we got the FBI files that we were tracked all the way on that visit,” Lunn said. Sugrue and Lunn had travelled to Mountain View in Silicon Valley, where they met with a high tech start-up to discuss buying a demodulator for the Russian state.

“What it was for was spectrum management for mobile phones. You could only sell it to governments as it was a restricted product,” Lunn said.

Amideon, he said, had the correct export licences to buy this product. A lot of the products it sourced were dual use, meaning they could be used for civilian or military purposes. They were used to the process.

The FBI, however, did not agree. “Denis really got very unlucky. There was a bit of turf war going on,” Lunn said.

It was only a few years after 9/11 leading to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002.

“No one kind of knew where the line was being drawn,” Lunn said. “We had gotten a licence from the Department of Homeland Security, but the FBI thought holy shit we are just after uncovering some dude coming in here and exporting dodgy stuff to Russia.

“Within an hour I’d say of picking him up the FBI realised he had an export license. And then it becomes with the FBI ‘Well, what are you guilty of?’”

Denis Sugrue was held in prison before being put under house arrest in LA. For several months he was tagged electronically restricting his movements. It was a scary time as he faced a potential prison sentence of ten years.

“Denis was lucky. He had a few quid so he could afford a good lawyer and in America that is the difference,” Lunn said. By April the FBI was in negotiations to drop all charges dropped against Denis Sugrue. Around this time, I rang his brother Owen Sugrue who told me from Egypt he was confident his brother would be cleared. “Denis has been innocent from the outset. That would be the view we’ve always had. Obviously, they seem to have come around to that view as well,” he told me back then.

Ultimately the FBI dropped all charges. Sugrue admitted to a “mislabelling” offence but this was a minor rule infringement, and not a crime.

“Denis is one of the point zero per cent of people arrested by the FBI who are not convicted of anything,” Lunn said.

Denis Sugrue later wrote a memoir on the experience, which he launched in 2010 in the Whitehouse, a pub in Limerick that dates back to 1812.

Did all the publicity damage business? “Well, it confirmed my mother’s worst thoughts!” Lunn laughed. “More seriously, funnily enough it was actually good for business in Russia.”

Against the grain in China

As Denis Sugrue fought to clear his name, Lunn was in China working for Amideon in its fast-growing manufacturing hub Shenzhen. He worked alongside Mike Gleaves, an Englishman who was an expert in radar from his days with the Royal Air Force. Gleaves was an expert in radar and wireless communications, who was fluent in Mandarin.

“We were struggling to get a foothold in China, so I moved out to give him a hand,” Lunn said. Lunn became part of the Irish community, which in those days was primarily made up of people working for ‘Mr China’ Liam Casey’s design manufacturing company PCH.

“We had a Gaelic football team down there, and I was one of the few members of the team not with PCH,” Lunn said. “Everyone kept telling me to join them.”

As Lunn started to immerse himself more in creating new products rather than mainly distributing them, he starting thinking about doing his own thing.

PCH was making goods in China, to sell to the West. Amideon was going in the opposite direction, trying to sell products from the West into China.

“China is a very, very tough place to sell. It is an easy place to buy, as whoever has the money is the boss in China,” he said.

Lunn had previously worked for Amideon for three years on-and-off in France but had no French. “I went to China and nobody spoke English. I found that Chinese suited my brain better, the musicality and intonations is what kills most people, but I found it easier.”

Who were you working with in China? “We were doing test systems for the likes of Huawei,” Lunn said. His wife got a job teaching the children of a senior executive in Huawei, and they began to integrate.

“Huawei had just built their new headquarters. It was swish but relatively they were still small,” Lunn said. Amideon built test systems for its mobile phones, and Lunn recalls being shown around its facilities.

“They were like, this is: the reverse engineering department!” Lunn laughed. “There was other’s equipment wall to wall.”

At the time, China was a cheap place to manufacture, but it couldn’t always deliver quality. “In a very, very short space of time it became the best place to build products to,.” Lunn said.

After about a year, Lunn moved back to Limerick in 2006, and built his home. “I then ended up taking over as CEO,” he said. He led a team of eight people with sales of €25 million.

“It was a decent success. It was myself, the two Sugrue brothers and Mike Gleaves,” he recalled. “We then started to build our own product, and develop our own intellectual property.”

At the same time the business was still selling and distributing for others. It was the Russian distributor for example for Acra Control in Dublin which made products for the defense and aerospace sector prior to its sale to New York Stock Exchange listed Curtiss-Wright Corporation. “We would have been doing millions of sales for them over the years in Russia,” Lunn said. “But I kept saying we should be building products for ourselves.”

The difference in margins between being a distributor and making products was attractive. Gradually Amideon did more of this, but Lunn kept pressing for more. Along the way it created a range of other businesses.

Lunn co-founded a company called Lamhroe which was a fabless semiconductor design house making high frequency electronics for the aerospace, communications and security sectors. “It was essentially a spin-in to the high frequency group at Queens University led by Dr Mark Kelly and Professor Vince Fusco,” Lunn explained.

“It was formed as a design centre for Amideon’s high frequency semiconductor requirements and developed some really impressive designs that if anything were ahead of their time.”

Qubis, the commercialisation arm of Queens, and Amideon seed funded the business which almost immediately became profitable, as Amideon already had the customers for it. Another company he helped set up was called Sensurity. “I lead the spin out with Dr Mark Kelly of Lamhroe and recruited the team and raised funds etc,” Lunn said.

Sensurity made wireless Perimeter Intrusion Detection Systems (PIDS) which essentially made invisible fences that could be used for example by a tech company to monitor its perimeter discreetly. Hexta, a Dutch shipping and logistics operator in the Netherlands, ended up acquiring this business. Did you make much money from the sale? “I probably got a pair of shoes out of it,” Lunn laughed.

As Lunn started to immerse himself more in creating new products rather than mainly distributing them, he starting thinking about doing his own thing.

“That was where the idea for a new company called Arralis came from,” Lunn said. “We were doing a lot of high frequency radar things and we could see it was a big opportunity. Myself and Mike Gleaves wanted to build our own products but they two boys weren’t up for that.”

Launching, building and selling a company

Barry Lunn founded his new venture called Arralis in 2013, along with Greaves. “The Sugrue brothers kind of bought us out and we bought out some intellectual property and went off to do Arralis,” he said.

The business only really got going in 2014, as both men gradually exited their joint interests with the Sugrue brothers. A small but experienced team formed around them. “We had sales from the beginning from old customers who came with us,” Lunn said. “We then went out and raised some venture money because we wanted to stop reselling other people’s products and build our own.”

A seed round of €1.3 million came together funded by ACT Venture Capital, Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland. The money allowed Arralis to build high frequency chips. These chips were used in all sorts of things, Lunn explained, like helicopter landing systems that could be used in snow or sand storms.

“Radar isn’t affected by rain or by dust as much,” he said. “Initially we were after the aero defence industry.”

The founders of Arralis knew the industry as they had in previous companies built a way of testing weather forecasting satellites which were needed ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “We had worked on an awful lot of really funky high frequency stuff,” Lunn said. Greaves was chief technology officer, while Lunn was chief executive.

“I was a bit like Napoleon without his army. Mentally I had moved, but it was only when I came back that I really talked to the troops.”

Barry Lunn

“Looking back it all moved very quick,” Lunn said. “We had raised €1.3 million and thrown in a few quid ourselves. It seemed like a lot of money at the time.”

Arralis has one office in Limerick and another in Belfast, to be close to a group of experts in high frequency chips who had come out of Queen’s University.

The British government had invested heavily in creating a tech leadership cluster in high frequency in order to develop products for its military. “There is a group of people from Queens who are world leaders in high frequency,” Lunn said, “I have worked with them for years.

“High frequency (as used in radar) was used by the military forever, but it is only in the last years that it has become commercial.”

For example, he said the US air force had developed a bird detection unit that operated at 94-GHz that was the size of a horsebox. “We developed technology so it could fit in the palm of your hand,” Lunn said. “We were commercialising military stuff.”

“We wouldn’t go into any new area until we could make it smaller and cheaper.”

Arralis began to work for the European Space Agency (ESA) and Nasa. “They were using us to help them with landing radar for future missions so they could identify debris and land in the right place,” Lunn said. Big aerospace makers like Boeing and Airbus also became customers.

What did you do for Boeing? “We were working with the Phantom Works part of their business. I have a suspicion what they were doing but they didn’t say.”

Boeing’s Phantom Works division’s work is often classified. Its projects are known include things like a stealth fighter called the Bird of Prey and Phantom Eye, a high-altitude reconnaissance drone.

“People think of Boeing and planes but more than 50 per cent of satellites are made by Boeing. It builds space shuttles…and Nasa put their labels on it,” he explained. In its first year, Arralis won a €250,000 contract from the ESA. “We built the business up to 20 or 30 people. We grew on the ESA contract and then we went to America. America really opened us up to the potential of the business. That was when the likes of the Northrops and the Boeings started talking to us,” Lunn said.

With their experience in China, the business was also working with firms like Beijing Bluesky Aviation Technology and Sino TekCo.

Lunn could see though there was a big opportunity for the business in the United States. Lunn had heard about how the autonomous car industry was beginning to take-off, and the plan was to win contracts in that sector too. Lunn moved to California with his wife Shelly and young sons Oscar and Oisín for a couple of months in 2016, and in 2017 decide to relocate his entire family to Los Angeles.

“I loved LA,” Lunn recalled. “But it was funny. I was a bit like Napoleon without his army. Mentally I had moved, but it was only when I came back that I really talked to the troops.”

Lunn met up with Eamon Ryan, a non-executive director of Arralis, for a coffee to discuss his move to the West coast. Ryan along with Pat O’Sullivan Greene, a director of the activist investor Sterling Strategic Value, are both long-term mentors and business associates of Lunn.

Ryan, who is from Kerry, had previously been operations director with Analog Devices for 25 years. He has been around the block in business.

“He said: ‘Have you ever talked to Mike (Greaves) about this? How does he feel about where the company is going? So we had our first shareholders meeting, rather than a board meeting,” Lunn recalled. “I said to Mike if we could sell this business tomorrow, would you? He said: ‘Oh, god, yeah.’”

Lunn said after he left Arralis, he wasn’t sure what to do. He had made enough money not to need to work. “That was for me very depressing,” he said.

Greaves was in his late 50s while Lunn was just 38. Greaves, after decades of travelling, wasn’t as eager as Lunn was to start again in the United States. The coffee caused Lunn to stop and think. He was in the middle of a fundraising and in talks with venture capital funds like Kleiner Perkins, corporates, and a group of private equity investors in Hong Kong.

“The private equity guys in Hong Kong had a VC arm and they were really interested in investing,” Lunn recalled. “They were really eager.

“They were Chinese guys essentially, although they wouldn’t have considered themselves as such exactly as they were from Hong Kong. I can’t disclose who they were but they are very big private equity guys.”

He sent them a text to see if they were interested in buying the entire business, rather than just having a stake in it.

“I was out for dinner with my wife for our anniversary when I got the text back that evening. It was towards the end of 2017, and they said they wanted to buy us, and for what price.”

By Christmas the deal was done, selling Arralis for a higher valuation than they planned to raise their series A off. “It was an all cash deal but they were also going to pump a bunch of money in,” Lunn said. “There were no earnouts. I had worked in China too long, so I knew the only cash that exists is what is in your pocket.”

Arralis was sold on the third anniversary, and Lunn now found himself as chief executive of a business owned by a group of Hong Kong investors. 

*****

In March 2017 the deal broke in the press. The reported price put on the business was €50 million but the company did not confirm this. What was the price? “The amount it was sold for was never reported, but it would have been in that region,” Lunn said. After the deal went through, he said the plan was to move to Hong Kong and set up its operations from there. Lunn struggled to get his children into school in Hong Kong, where the best schools have big backlogs.

The Hong Kong investors meanwhile had bought an automotive company in Austria, and then they got involved in an aviation business in Slovenia.  Then Lunn discovered that the chairman he was going to be reporting into was going to be in Austria. “So, we decided to move to Vienna in Austria instead,” Lunn said. “The money came in and they backed our business plan.

“They saw the potential for high frequency electronics and they wanted to IPO the business in Hong Kong.”

There was a rule change around IPOs in Hong Kong which put a brake on this. Lunn kept working away with Arralis, but he started thinking about the next challenge. He remembers meeting with GM Ventures, the venture capital arm of the car giant. Talk turned to how radar could help car safety. “I said you are going to have to use missile grade technology on cars as that is all they are…missiles on wheels,” Lunn recalled.

“We said we make military grade radar and you’re going to need that.” A seed was planted now in Lunn’s head.

*****

Why Elon Musk is wrong on self-driving cars

The Society of Automotive Engineers defines six levels of driving ranging from zero meaning fully manual to five where the car is fully autonomous. In October 2015 in a widely shared post on Medium, Gavin Sheridan, an occasional contributor to The Currency, predicted that Elon Musk’s Tesla was planning to create fully autonomous cars based on new features being built into his cars. A year later Musk confirmed that he believed every future Tesla would be capable of driving itself.

He predicted that by the end of 2017 a Tesla would be able to drive across America without human intervention. Four years on this, isn’t near happening. On October 20 this year Musk tweeted: “FSD (Full-Self Driving) beta rollout happening tonight. Will be extremely slow & cautious, as it should.” In other words, it was still a long way off happening.

Lunn is skeptical about Tesla, and believes Musk is going in the wrong direction. “Anyone can get to level two,” he said. “But the gulf to level five is so far away.”

His hardware background makes it hard for him to believe that Musk can ever make his existing cars self-driving.

“It is hard to take Elon’s claims very seriously. You can upgrade the software in a Tesla over the air alright but you can’t upgrade the actual hardware. The hardware in his existing cars isn’t capable of doing what needs to be done,” he said.

“Humans are the cause of over 90 per cent of accidents. Nothing else matters when you think about it. If everyone avoids each other all the time that is what matters. People are just replicating humans so they are putting in vision systems and cameras instead of eyes and saying that is how we are going to solve autonomous driving.

“That is a really dumb approach as all you are going to do is automate the human. You are going to make more accidents, not less.”

After our interview Electrek, a specialist electric car publication wrote an article saying it believed Tesla is planning to move to a “new radar technology” being developed by an Israeli startup called Arbe Robotics. Lunn tweeted a link to the article noting that Tesla may be “getting serious” about radar. This shift to radar is exactly why he founded Provizio.

Lunn said after he left Arralis, he wasn’t sure what to do. He had made enough money not to need to work. “That was for me very depressing,” he said. He kept thinking about the problem of how to make cars safer, and in August 2019 founded Provizio.

“I had built up a network of people I started talking to. It wasn’t a radar company I was planning to build but a company to solve accidents.” On paper he sketched out the sensor suite needed to ensure cars avoided accidents, and started to look at how to make such a product.

Lunn said Provizio planned to licence its tech, but keep any critical data that can save lives open source.

“It is all about vision and foresight. All accidents are caused by that. Why did you rear end the guy in front of you? Because you learned too late to brake when you saw his red light and so you hit him. And then the guy behind you hit you because he learned too late. What if you could have known what the guy five cars ahead of you was doing? It was him or her who caused the accident to happen.”

“That needs situational awareness that a human doesn’t have and that no machine on the road today has.”

Lunn said that a lot of the hardware to do this already existed, but not for cars.

“For foresight you need to be able to see long distances. Light can’t travel through objects or around objects. Lidar (which uses light based pules to model the environment around a car) can’t solve that problem. It had to be radar. Radar can see around things, it isn’t affected by rain or snow…that is what is needed.”

Provizio plans to create something which can do all these cars for cars. It employs 11 people divided between offices in Limerick, Belfast and Pittsburgh. Lunn has teamed up with some of the same people he has worked with for years in previous businesses to co-found the business.

They are all highly specialised in engineering, software and sensors and include Peter Ludlow, Denver Humphry, Luke Curley, Eamonn Boland and Steve Christie. Each of them has worked with Lunn before in at least one company. In the United States Lunn is working with a small team of engineers who came out of Carnegie Mellon University who have a background in autonomous vehicles.

Are you going to raise external money to fund this? “Absolutely. I am doing that,” Lunn said. “We are nearly there in closing out our seed round.” Lunn said until the round closed he couldn’t name his investors but he said “the majority are people from the industry”.

“It is mind blowing some of the guys we are working with,” Lunn said.

Like who? “Well, Bobby Hambrick who founded AutonomouStuff is an advisor.”

Hambrick is a pioneer in researching autonomous vehicles whose company has supplied big players in the field like General Motors and Uber.

Hexagon, a Stockholm stock market leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions which employs 20,000 people, bought the business in 2018.

“David Moloney from Movidius has been an advisor from the beginning,” Lunn added. Moloney is a cofounder of machine vision company Movidius which was sold for over €300 million to Intel in 2016.

“We have got some really good people on board. A group of people in the States. We have confidentiality agreements in place with five of the top ten automotive guys in the world,” Lunn said. “We are working with the top tier. In autonomy we are working with three of the top four players.” 

Lunn said Provizio planned to licence its tech, but keep any critical data that can save lives open source.

“This has huge implications for the insurance industry and the government. If you cut out accidents tomorrow we could have the best healthcare system in Europe because the cost to the state is so high for road accidents.”

“Along with having a tax rebate for having an electric vehicle if you have the safest vehicle you should get a tax rebate on that. It is a no brainer for the government.”

*****

Barry Lunn pauses for a moment. He asks me to look at my garden. “The human eye…look at all the stuff it has to filter. If objects of velocity are all that is important to me this scene gets much smaller very quickly. You have to start to think like that…like a machine and not like a human being. Our weakness is we see too much and filtering is the problem. That is why the software we are making is so important behind our sensor platform.” Can you do it? “Yes. It is huge. It is trying to change an industry. It is a long term play and to get there we will partner, partner, partner.”