The device
Same pole.
New intelligence.
SOVA is a smart cap that retrofits the delineator poles already lining our roads, making road poles smart.
SOVA · Smart Traffic Eyes The road has eyes now.
SOVA turns ordinary roadside poles into a solar-powered sensor mesh that sees every moving object, warns drivers before danger appears and gives road authorities live traffic intelligence.
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01 · Sees
Every pole becomes an eye.
A solar-powered scanner in each cap detects vehicles, people, animals and obstacles, on roads that never had sensors.
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02 · Talks
Every pole talks to neighbouring poles.
Warnings hop pole-to-pole over an RF mesh, and gateway poles stream the live traffic data to the cloud over the cellular network.
Every pole. Every object. Every second.
One mesh network watching the whole road, day and night.
The problem
We know there’s a road. We don’t know what’s on it.
Road operators see the asphalt on a map, not the cars, people, animals and hazards moving on it. Six reasons traffic stays blind:
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We don’t see the traffic
Most roads have no eyes at all. What happens between two cameras is invisible.
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We don’t know where the cars are
No live picture of vehicles, pedestrians or animals on the carriageway.
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Reaction time is slow
Hazards are reported by people, minutes after they happen, if at all.
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Expensive & hard to optimise
Conventional roadside sensors need mains power and a data cable: dig a trench, lay cable, connect to the grid and close lanes, kilometre after kilometre.
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Non-smart cars won’t become smart
The cars already on our roads will be there for decades, without connectivity.
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Safety awareness is low
A driver can’t react to a danger hidden behind the next curve.
Now add SOVA.
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Every pole becomes an eye
Solar smart caps on the posts already lining the road see every car, person and animal, with no trench and no grid.
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Danger flagged at once
The poles around a stopped car flag it straight away, and the warning hops pole-to-pole to the drivers heading its way. Older cars get it through the app.
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Warned before the curve
A deer hidden behind the bend is flagged, and the warning travels pole-to-pole back to the driver approaching it, who slows down.
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Pole to pole, then to the cloud
Poles pass data to their neighbours over an RF mesh; only a few gateway poles have a cellular connection and send it on to the SOVA cloud.
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The Big Data of traffic
Large-scale traffic monitoring offering:
- Live traffic metrics through Big Data
- Drastically improved traffic safety
- High-impact traffic optimisations
- Multiple application opportunities
Why it matters
The stakes are measured in lives.
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1.19million
road traffic deaths worldwide every year
Source: WHO, Global status report on road safety 2023WHO road safety report 2023
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19,940
people lost their lives on EU roads in 2024
Source: European Commission, road safety statistics 2024European Commission, 2024
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−50%by 2030
EU target: halve road deaths and serious injuries by 2030, close to zero by 2050 (Vision Zero)
Source: EU Road Safety Policy Framework 2021–2030EU Road Safety Policy Framework
One life lost on the world’s roads every ~27 seconds.
Since you arrived on the website 0 estimate
Road traffic injuries are the leading killer of children and young people aged 5–29 Source: WHO, Global status report on road safety 2023WHO road safety report 2023
Same pole.
Retrofit, not rebuild
Fits the poles already in place.
- No trenching
- No cabling
- No grid
Solar laminates on the top, both long faces and the back of the cap harvest daylight, so a pole can be installed anywhere along the road without trenching or power lines.
K01 Made for the official Croatian K01 delineator post: 90 cm high as installed on Croatian roads, with 80 and 105 cm variants.
€350 per pole + installation no new infrastructure
Object scanner
The eyes of the owl.
“Sova” is Croatian for owl: the night watcher that sees what others miss.
One lens on each side of the cap watches the road in each direction, continuously detecting any larger moving obstacle: the “eyes” of the owl. Neighbouring poles triangulate its position precisely.
Inside the cap
01 / 08
Solar powered
Energy-autonomous: no grid connection, no cabling.
Solar laminates on the top, both long faces and the back of the cap harvest daylight, so a pole can be installed anywhere along the road without trenching or power lines.
LED warning system
One ring. Every driver.
The poles ahead of the danger light up: visible to every driver, no app or new car required.
Three products
For every roadside.
€350 per unit + installation
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SOVA Head
Existing delineator posts
The smart head for the delineator posts already on the road. Cellular connectivity is included on gateway poles only.
All eight components
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SOVA Pole
New locations
The complete pole with SOVA built in, for new locations that have no poles at all. Same technology as SOVA Head.
All eight components
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SOVA Fence
Crash-barrier delineators
For sections with a crash barrier, where the reflectors are mounted on the barrier instead of on posts.
No gyroscope
How it works
Sense.
Share.
Signal.
Learn.
SOVA is a smart pole equipped with sensors monitoring traffic for any moving objects on the road, communicating with each other via a mesh network and feeding big data to the cloud.
Live detections · pole #0142 Simulated
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Vehicle78 km/h
3F2A -
Pedestrianshoulder
7C1B -
Vehicleoncoming · 64 km/h
9D07 -
Animal / obstaclenone in range
…
Mesh relay · pole to pole Simulated
6 hops · 36 ms
Detection→ RF mesh →Gateway pole → cellular → cloud
SOVA · V2X
Stopped vehicle in 350 m
Slow down
78 km/h
Hazard beyond the curve
21:47
Thursday · Rijeka
SOVA app · route monitored
Stopped vehicle ahead
380 m ahead on your route. Slow down.
Illustrative Simulated data, showing the kind of insight a SOVA corridor produces.
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01Sense
Every pole becomes an owl’s eye.
One lens on each side of the cap watches the road in each direction, continuously detecting any larger moving obstacle: the “eyes” of the owl. Neighbouring poles triangulate its position precisely. Each detection gets a class, a speed and an ID.
Energy-autonomous
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02Share
A warning travels faster than any car.
Each pole talks to its neighbours over RF, through an antenna inside the casing. A warning hops pole-to-pole along the road, reaching drivers before they reach the danger. Traffic data hops along the same mesh to the nearest gateway pole.
- RF mesh: Pole-to-pole network. Antenna inside the casing.
- Cellular gateway: Uplink.
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03Signal
Every driver gets the message.
A stopped car hides beyond a blind curve. SOVA warns the traffic behind it through three channels, whatever people drive.
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04Learn
Every detection becomes traffic intelligence.
Not every pole needs a mobile connection. Poles relay their data over the RF mesh to selected gateway poles, whose cellular module streams it to the SOVA cloud for live dashboards, machine-learning predictions and remote management.
- Seeing through data
- ML traffic predictions
- Critical data feed to traffic control
- Data owned by SOVA
Live demo · Traffic safety
See around the corner.
A blind mountain curve at night. Just past the rock face, a deer steps onto the road. At 80 km/h the driver sees it 50 m out: too late to stop. SOVA poles see it the moment it reaches the carriageway and pass the warning back pole-to-pole, so the driver knows ~480 m before the curve.
Traffic Safety · in this demo
- 01Road obstacle detection
- 02Collision warning system
- 03Critical data feed to traffic control
- 04Road safety improvements
With SOVA the warning arrives 480 m ahead, 8× the stopping distance. Simulation · illustrative parameters
Simulation · auto-play: SOVA on, then off
Turns the SOVA pole network on or off and restarts the approach.
Camera
Same curve, same driver
Deer on road · Simulation · illustrative parameters
| Metric | SOVA on | SOVA off |
|---|---|---|
| Warning distance | 480 m | 50 m |
| Warning time | 21.6 s | 2.3 s |
| Impact speed | 0 km/h | 37 km/h |
Live demo · Traffic quality
Every movement, measured.
At a city junction the same SOVA poles could count and classify every car, bus, bike and pedestrian and feed the junction's signal controller, so signals answer the queues that are actually there instead of a timetable, and every movement becomes data a traffic engineer can act on.
Use case · Traffic Quality
- Traffic flow improvements
- Traffic jam preventions
- Road regulation optimizations
- Greener roads / less pollution
Detected now
60 SOVA poles- Cars & vans…
- Buses & trucks…
- Cyclists…
- Pedestrians…
Classified this session
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Controller
Adaptive (SOVA-fed)
Phase
…
Waiting for the junction feed…
Junction metrics
Simulated
Average wait
…
…
same traffic, two controllers
- Vehicles / min
- …
- Stops · 5 min
- …
- Idle CO₂ · 5 min
- …
- Pedestrian wait
- …
Queue per approachfixed
- N…
- E…
- S…
- W…
Throughput · veh/minlast 4 min
Simulated: adaptive control cut average wait by roughly a third vs a tuned fixed plan (illustrative, not field data).
How this simulation works
One stream of arrivals feeds two controllers running side by side: a reasonably tuned fixed-time plan (26 s N–S, 16 s E–W, 14 s pedestrian stage every cycle) and an adaptive controller fed by the poles' live detections (green extension, gap-out, queue pressure and on-demand pedestrian phases). Average wait is control delay over the last 5 minutes: every second spent queuing (including vehicles still in the queue) per vehicle served. Simplified model: through and right-turn movements, pedestrian scramble phase, IDM car-following, ≈ 100 m of each approach modelled. Idling CO₂ assumes ≈ 0.39 g/s per car (≈ 0.6 L/h petrol) and ≈ 1.9 g/s per bus or truck.
Across repeated runs of this model in normal traffic, adaptive control cut the average wait by roughly a third compared with the fixed plan (typically 15–45 %, depending on the moment and the traffic mix); idling CO₂ falls by a similar share, while the number of stops and pedestrian waits change less. Figures are illustrative, not field measurements.
Big data · National command centre
The Big Data of traffic.
Every SOVA pole is a sensor. Strung along Croatia’s 1,356 km of motorways, an estimated 27,120 poles become one live, country-scale picture of traffic (speed, congestion, incidents, wrong-way drivers and wildlife), relayed over the mesh to cellular gateway poles and streamed to the road authority the moment it happens.
- 01Seeing through dataEvery kilometre measured, not estimated.
- 02ML traffic predictionsCongestion forecast hours ahead, per corridor.
- 03Scientific studiesMovement data for safety and mobility research.
SOVA Command
Croatia · motorway network
Simulated feed
16:38:00CEST
Data layers
Average speed against the limit on every 500 m segment of both carriageways, updated as vehicles pass the poles.
Network status
- Vehicles counted today
- 286,400
- Avg speed
- 104km/h
- Active incidents
- 3
- Poles online
- 27,120
- Network
- 1,356km
Live incident feed
- Accident detected · 0.8 sStationary vehicles · drivers warned in 0.8 s
- Animal on carriagewayDrivers warned in 0.7 s
- Congestion forming · ETA +12 minML: peak in 25 min
- Pole #2,044 knocked · gyroscope alertTilt 64° · maintenance ticket opened
ML forecast · 6 h
A1 Zagreb – Split – Ploče
MeasuredPredicted90 % band
ML suggestionVariable speed limit 130 → 100 km/h, Lučko–Jastrebarsko, from 17:05
The dashboard shows what SOVA on the roadside posts of Croatia’s 1,356 km of motorways would report. The map draws the 11 motorways (1,274 km) along their real alignments; per-motorway pole counts split the 27,120 poles (≈20 roadside posts per km) by length. Adding SOVA Fence on the crash-barrier delineators, full coverage would be ≈80 units per km, 108,480 in all.
For governments & road authorities
Built for Vision Zero.
What a road authority gets: incidents flagged the moment they happen, warnings that reach drivers before they reach the danger, and a live data feed to traffic control, from solar-powered poles that need no trenching and no grid connection.
The deadline
2030 is Vision Zero’s halfway mark. Measures that need cabling and trenching along every kilometre are hard to roll out network-wide in time. SOVA needs neither.
Source: EU Road Safety Policy Framework 2021–2030EU Road Safety Policy Framework
What road authorities get
Eyes on every kilometre, without the civil works.
A SOVA cap upgrades the delineator posts you already own into a live, self-powered safety and data network.
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01
Retrofit, not rebuild
The smart cap clips onto the delineator posts already lining your roads, and SOVA Fence onto the delineators mounted on crash barriers, so coverage continues along those sections. New locations with no poles at all get SOVA Pole, with SOVA built in. No new masts, no foundations, no cabling: the network is already standing. Installing it is a cap, not a construction project, and each cap's GPS places it on the network map by itself.
- Posts & crash barriers
- Fast roll-out
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02
Energy-autonomous
Solar laminates on the top, both long faces and the back of the cap harvest daylight, so a pole can be installed anywhere along the road without trenching or power lines. Keeps sensing through the night, and charges even in frost.
- Solar powered
- LTO battery
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03
Every driver, every car
- Light signal on the poles The poles ahead of the danger light up: visible to every driver, no app or new car required.
- Signal to modern vehicles Connected cars receive a specific signal so the driver can promptly react to sudden dangers.
- Mobile application Owners of older-generation vehicles are warned through the SOVA mobile app.
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04
Instant incident detection
Neighbouring poles see every object from both directions, so a stopped vehicle, debris or an animal is flagged the moment it appears. The pole senses its own orientation, so a knocked-down or tilted pole is itself an instant incident report. A cap taken from its post can be located by its GPS.
- Accident detection
- Wrong-way driver detection
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05
Critical data feed to traffic control
Live warnings and traffic metrics hop over the RF mesh to cellular gateway poles, which stream them straight into your control room.
- Live monitoring at full scale
- Alarming system
- Reporting
- Big-data export
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06
Evidence-based planning
Decide on speed limits, signage and investments with measured traffic behaviour instead of estimates, and open the data to research.
- Road regulation optimisations
- ML traffic predictions
- Scientific studies
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Aligned with the goals your policies already serve.
SDG 9
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
SOVA aims to improve the quality of traffic infrastructure through development and implementation of innovative technologies.
SDG 11
Sustainable cities and communities
SOVA contributes to the safety of communities, allowing the creation of numerous applications that benefit sustainability and resiliency.
SOVA is a simple and intelligent solution in line with the UN’s global sustainable development goals, which with the help of machine learning, optimises and makes traffic safer and more efficient.
Market · for expansion
From Croatia to Europe.
01TAM · Total addressable market
565,183km
Motorways and national roads across Europe
Delineator posts already line Europe’s motorways and national roads. Every one of them can carry a SOVA cap: solar powered, with no cabling and no grid connection.
02SAM · Serviceable market
76,878km
EU27 motorways
The motorways of the 27 EU member states, where speeds are highest.
03SOM · Obtainable market
1,356km
Croatia’s motorways
We start at home. Croatia’s 1,356 km motorway network is the first market: the country where SOVA is being designed by Exevio in Rijeka.
04Rollout · SOM economics
27,120poles est.
Croatia, pole by pole
- Unit cost
- €250
- Unit price
- €350 + installation
- SOM revenue
- €9.5Mrange €5.7M–€19.0M
- Gross profit
- €2.7Mrange €1.6M–€5.4M
Base case, est. · 1,356 km × ≈20 roadside posts / km (range 12–40) · hardware only · basis
UpsideFull coverage with SOVA Fence
- Units est.
- 108,480
- Revenue
- €38.0M
- Gross profit
- €10.8M
- TAM565,183 km
- SAM76,878 km
- SOM1,356 km
Road km · circles to scale by area
Business model
Four ways a pole earns.
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01Hardware margin
€100per unit
Priced at €350 + installation against a projected €250 unit cost (projection at TRL 9): €100 margin per unit, for SOVA Head and SOVA Fence alike.
At SOM scale27,120 poles → €9.5M revenue · €2.7M gross profit
UpsideFull coverage with SOVA Fence108,480 units → €38.0M revenue · €10.8M gross profit
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02Licensing
€0.10per active pole / month
Recurring software revenue on top of the hardware, for every pole in operation. Includes:
- Live monitoring at full scale
- Alarming system
- Machine-learning road optimisation suggestions
- Reporting
- Big-data export
At SOM scale27,120 poles → €2,712 / month · €32,544 / year
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03Data & IP
Owned data
- Data owned by SOVA
- Patentable technology
Every pole adds to a live traffic dataset that powers data-driven applications:
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04Network upside
Helium Hotspots
Hotspots provide miles of wireless network coverage for millions of devices using Helium LongFi. Hotspots earn HNT for transferring device data over the network. The more device data a Hotspot transfers, the more it earns.
How Hotspots earn HNT (opens the Helium documentation in a new tab)
The ask: a €1M seed round to take SOVA to TRL 7
Roadmap & the askRoadmap · long story short
Roadmap to TRL 7
Research is done and self-funded. The seed round drives SOVA through prototyping and a live demonstration to TRL 7; Series A then takes it to sales, production and TRL 9.
- Self-funded
- €1M seedTRL 7
- Series ATRL 9
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Self-funded
01Research
Exploration & analysis
✓ Done
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€1M seedTRL 7
02Raise money
Seed capital
We are here
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03
Prototype
Build, test, rebuild, retest
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04
Live environment validation
Demonstration
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Series ATRL 9
05Raise money
Series A
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06
Sales
& production
The ask · seed capital
€1M takes SOVA to TRL 7 Prototype → Live environment validation
Seed capital to turn validated research into a working, demonstrated system: prototypes built, tested, rebuilt and retested, then shown in a live demonstration.
Where the €1M goes
Share of the €1M seed round; euro amounts derived from the percentages and rounded.
Team · key experts
Built by Exevio.
SOVA was born inside Exevio, the Rijeka venture builder that has been turning ideas into working digital products since 2013. Now that experience goes to the road, into AI that detects hazards and predicts traffic as it happens.
- Since
- 2013
- Based in
- Rijeka, Croatia
The CEO
Edi Budimilić
Founder & CEO
I’m an entrepreneur my whole life. I started building Exevio by investing my rich know-how, heart and soul back in 2013 and haven’t stopped to this day.
- Sold a 500-client web hosting business
- Lived and worked in Silicon Valley
- Featured on the cover of Forbes Croatia
- 500 Startups alumnus
- Mentor at incubators & accelerators
- Part of the team behind Croatia’s first satellite
Cover story · Forbes Croatia
Next step
Let’s put eyes on the roads.
Whether you run a road network or invest in infrastructure that saves lives, SOVA starts with one conversation: a pilot stretch, a data partnership or a seat in the seed round.