Infrastructure engineering software giant Bentley Systems has put money into transport software company Flow Labs, which specialises in digital twins for agencies to model and test real-world scenarios.
No details on the size of the investment were revealed, but it comes through Bentley iTwin Ventures - a corporate venture capital fund - and is designed to "broaden the scope and reach of Flow Labs' offerings".
The fund invests in emerging firms which focus on digital. Flow Labs says its scalable platform offers a cost-effective path to integrate data, view network analytics, monitor traffic flows, optimise multimodal traffic signals, and provide on-demand transportation project evaluation.
Flow Labs founder and CEO Jatish Patel says the partnership will accelerate digital twin capability across the transportation space.
"To solve such complex challenges, you can't do it alone, and industry collaboration has been a core part of our philosophy," he added.
Tom Kurke, vice president of iTwin, says Flow Labs "leverages synthetic data sets generated from aggregated, cleaned and fused traffic sensor and connected car data, to optimize road conditions, starting with smart signalling".
Flow Labs says it has demonstrated the ability to reduce crash risk by 51%, lower emissions by 21% and reduce travel times by 24% using digital twins.
