With a focus on creating robust, reliable, safe, and secure software for autonomous mobility systems, a company called Apex.AI was officially announced on Nov. 15.

The company recently closed a $15.5 million Series A funding.

“Apex.AI is transitioning autonomous vehicle software from R&D to commercialization so that it meets highest safety and reliability standards, a need for both automakers and consumers,” Apex.AI says in a company blog post.

With a belief in a modular and diverse approach to software, Apex.AI has designed a modular software stack that can be easily integrated into existing systems, and also allows for the easy integration of third party software.

“We think highly focused specialists can develop a better overall system than one company developing a full-stack — which will likely not fit all applications,” Apex.AI says.

The company adds that its software is not designed for peak performance; rather, it is designed to never fail, as Apex.AI has built redundancies into the system design to make sure that single failures don’t lead to system-wide failures.

Apex.OS and Apex.Autonomy

Apex.AI’s first two products are Apex.OS and Apex.Autonomy.

Described as a “robust and reliable software framework or meta-operating system” for autonomous mobility, Apex.OS is an automotive version of the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. It abstracts hardware-specific, real-time, and embedded software development, allowing developers to focus on building production-grade autonomous driving applications on top of Apex.OS.

“We modify the popular and widely used ROS software framework to ensure compatibility to the development standard and have added mechanisms for real-time, functional safety, and security,” Apex.AI explains.

The company adds that Apex.OS will be certified to the highest automotive functional safety level (ASIL D) according to the automotive safety standard ISO 26262 in 2019.

Apex.Autonomy provides developers with building blocks for autonomy. Apex.AI believes that its customers should be able to pick and choose software building blocks from an ecosystem to compose a software stack that is right for their application , as opposed to taking a full-stack that has been developed by a single third party.

So Apex.AI has started to build those blocks, such as automotive grade LiDAR data processing, and the company is also working to expand this into an open ecosystem.

“There are different approaches to building software for autonomous systems and some have chosen to create an entirely new system from scratch,” Apex.AI says.

“We believe ROS provides significant benefit — including widespread adoption, a huge developer community, and a decade of application development. Apex.OS is meant to transition and bolster ROS, not replace it.”

Apex.AI notes that Apex.OS is application agnostic, which means that any autonomous mobility system , including cars, robots, UAS or airplanes, can use it.