MicroTraffic acquired by Kitchener firm

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This article was published 02/03/2023 (1114 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MicroTraffic, a Winnipeg company that develops technology to accurately predict dangerous traffic scenarios, has been acquired by a Kitchener traffic hardware and software company that it has already been working with.

Founders Craig Milligan and Joel Penner and its 21 staffers will now become the Winnipeg office of Miovision, adding MicroTraffic’s predictive analysis to Miovision’s array of services that helps cities reduce traffic congestion and vehicle emissions and improving public safety through intelligent transportation solutions.

MicroTraffic grew quickly by word-of-mouth since starting in 2017. Milligan and Penner were partners in a traffic safety consultancy when they used their tool on a stretch of the Perimeter Highway that predicted a fatality before it happened.

“We were not happy with the process of just reacting to crash data after the fact,” Milligan said.

So they built this tool that can proactively identify near-misses.

It now has customers in 100 cities around the world.

“The decision to sell was interesting,” Milligan said. “We have a narrow, specific solution. They have a broad and powerful platform, a whole ecosystem for traffic and smart cities and we can plug into every element of their system. We felt it could accelerate our work towards saving lives on the road.”

Miovision builds portable traffic study units that can count traffic in all sorts of ways and do all sort of analysis.

Since it raised $120 million in venture capital in early 2020 Miovision has acquired a couple of other companies and MicroTraffic is the third acquisition.

Tony Florio, a spokesman for Miovision which has about 300 employees, said, “MicroTraffic is a big one for us. Safety is becoming a really big policy focus, especially in the U.S.”

The U.S. federal government has recently committed $5 billion over the next five years to fund initiatives to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries with $800 million for 510 communities across the U.S. this year.

MicroTraffic’s predictive tool has been shown to be surprisingly accurate.

Researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University showed that MicroTraffic’s proprietary approach can predict, based on near misses, the future number of fatal and injury crashes with 94 per cent accuracy.

In addition to the portable video traffic study units Miovision’s also has technology that can be permanently installed in traffic signals.

Milligan said by teaming up with Miovision it can go from helping a city like Winnipeg at a couple of dozen intersections to using it at 700 intersections.

“They have the perfect platform,” he said. “That was the top factor in deciding to sell to Miovision.

No terms of the deal were disclosed.

MicroTraffic raised about $1 million in a seed round of financing a couple of years ago and in addition to Milligan and Penner other MicroTraffic staffers own shares in the company.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca