Advanced driver-assistance systems eliminate 80%+ of crashes, but they remain standard only on vehicles most people can't afford.
Will Bright saw that gap and decided it shouldn’t exist. After losing a close friend in a preventable crash involving a brand-new vehicle that lacked modern driver-assistance features, he began building a way to bring proven safety technology to the cars already on the road.
Today, we’re excited to invest in Saferide, an upfit driver-assistance platform designed to make modern safety accessible to everyone. Will is a repeat builder who previously scaled a hardware company to over $100M in annual revenue and assembled a compact, senior engineering team with deep automotive experience. Early design partners and initial purchase orders signal real demand.
The Opportunity
Over 300M vehicles in the U.S. and roughly 1.5B globally lack modern driver-assistance features.
The national fleet takes 25+ years to cycle, and with less than 30% of new vehicles equipped from the factory, the safety gap continues to widen.
Dealers are actively searching for new high-trust upsells and subscription revenue tied to real value.
Advances in cameras, edge compute, and open driving stacks have made upfit ADAS technically and economically viable for the first time.
What Saferide Actually Builds
Think of Saferide as a safety infrastructure layer for the world’s existing vehicles:
ADAS Upfit: A compact vision & compute module paired with CAN integrations that delivers lane centering, pedestrian detection, and adaptive safety features.
Dealer-native installation: A hardware and harness system designed for fast installs without specialized tooling or OEM involvement.
On-device intelligence: Edge perception and control systems that operate without cloud dependence.
Connected safety platform (roadmap): OTA updates, dealer connectivity, and a growing data layer that compounds with every installed vehicle.
When safety technology is locked inside high-end vehicles, progress moves at the speed of replacement cycles. Saferide changes that dynamic by bringing modern assistance to the cars that are already on the road. By turning safety into a scalable platform, the company has the potential to compress decades of safety diffusion into years and make meaningful improvements on roads far sooner than the OEM cycle allows.
If you’re building to make the world a safer place, our inbox is always open. For now, welcome Saferide to the Redbud family. We’re excited to help them make modern vehicle safety accessible to millions of drivers.
