A Leuven spin-out is selling Euro NCAP an eight-hour version of its 400-hour footage review

Fifty times faster on one batch of footage, which is 392 hours taken out of every 400 ^[21], is a deeper cut than the more than 95 per cent IVEX claims for itself ^[2], and a strange thing to price. The pool it is sold into is measured in the hours it removes: the global automotive testing and validation services market was put at 17.9 billion dollars in 2025 and is forecast at 32.4 billion by 2033 ^[8], which compounds at 7.7 per cent a year ^[22], and services revenue is engineer time billed. So the money has to come off hours saved rather than hours worked, a calculation that depends on a batch price and an engineer rate that haven't been published ^[25].

The version of the thesis that survives that, or rather the more interesting version, is volumetric. Euro NCAP's protocols for 2026 to 2028 lean harder on evidence from real-world driving ^[6], and vehicles keep collecting cameras, radar and driver-assistance features, so the volume of footage that has to be checked keeps rising past what human inspection can absorb ^[9]. IVEX's own stated route is fewer hours per engineer rather than more engineers ^[26], which makes its revenue a function of batch count times price, not headcount times rate. Mario Torres, co-founder and chief executive, frames the product as keeping engineers in control with every result traceable to the original data ^[7], and the mechanism matches: the software proposes, an engineer approves each decision, and the chain back to the sensor data is the deliverable ^[12].

Euro NCAP's tightening of the protocols is on record ^[6]. Whether carmakers are actually paying for the analysis is not. Euro NCAP is named as the primary customer ^[27], the round pays for wider NCAP protocol coverage, data infrastructure and a regulatory and commercial presence in North America and Asia ^[17], and the buyers IVEX says it will approach there are regulators and manufacturers together ^[20]. The entity whose protocols create the work is also the account. That is a comfortable place to sit and a concentrated one.

Capital next door runs at a different order of magnitude. Applied Intuition carried a 15 billion dollar valuation after a 600 million dollar round in June 2025 and leads on virtual testing ^[13]; Foretellix has raised more than 135 million dollars with Nvidia and Temasek behind it ^[14]; Kognic has raised about 43 million for labelling sensor data ^[15]. IVEX has disclosed a little over 6 million euros in total since its roughly 1.2 million euro seed in 2020 ^[18], and since 1.2 plus 5 is 6.2, the undisclosed 2023 extension added almost nothing to the public record ^[23]. On nominal figures, before any exchange rate, Applied Intuition's single June round is 120 times this Series A ^[24]. What that gap buys is the choice not to build a simulation stack, and to sell protocol coverage and traceability instead ^[17][12].

The counter-thesis has several shapes worth holding. Bringing the analysis in-house is an option for Euro NCAP, and not conceptually hard when the protocol is already the specification ^[6]. Applied Intuition or Foretellix could walk downstream from simulated edge cases into scored recordings from public roads, where IVEX currently sits alone among the funded names ^[16]. A third possibility is that the 2026 to 2028 protocols raise the evidentiary bar without multiplying batch counts, in which case a fifty-fold speed-up is a discount handed to a customer that was never going to buy fifty times the volume ^[21]. The figure that settles which of those is happening is the price of a batch, which remains unpublished ^[25].