South Bend, Ind. (Feb. 15, 2022) – SAFA today announced a $20,000 investment from Elevate Ventures’ Community Ideation Fund.
SAFA uses artificial intelligence to improve safety analysis of technical documents and software in the automotive, robotics, IoT (internet of things), and medical device industries. The SAFA software integrates with existing systems to automatically detect and analyze system changes, providing real-time warnings and recommendations for hazard mitigation.
Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang, a professor and lead researcher at the University of Notre Dame, developed SAFA in 2021. Huang and CEO Aarik Gulaya collaborated with the IDEA Center at Notre Dame to accelerate the commercialization of SAFA’s technology.
“SAFA is an excellent example of a startup developing high-tech solutions for specific industry problems,” said Nicholas Kuhn, Elevate Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence serving Startup South Bend-Elkhart, a partnership that supports entrepreneurs in north-central Indiana. “SAFA is harnessing the most advanced AI capabilities to solve difficult and potentially dangerous problems.”
SAFA will use the funding from Elevate to develop a minimal viable product and recruit software developer talent to expand safety features.
“This funding will allow our team to jump over any hurdles and execute on our development partnerships,” said Gulaya. “We will be better able to meet our goal of providing innovative solutions to improve quality, efficiency and safety in high-risk industries.”
SAFA received a $20,000 pre-seed investment from the Elevate Nexus Regional Pitch Competition in 2021.
