Global outreach October 27, 2026
From an Open Call to the Open Road: How DareeSoft and Brisa Brought AI Incident Detection to Portuguese Motorways
On 19 October 2026, DareeSoft CEO & Founder Betty Row stepped onto the stage at Ahead Start 2026 Corporate Innovation Day, invited back by Brisa and Plug and Play to tell a startup success story. Eighteen months earlier, we had answered an open call from the other side of the world. This time, we came back with results from real Portuguese motorways.On 19 October 2026, DareeSoft CEO & Founder Betty Row stepped onto the stage at Ahead Start 2026 Corporate Innovation Day, invited back by Brisa and Plug and Play to tell a startup success story. Eighteen months earlier, we had answered an open call from the other side of the world. This time, we came back with results from real Portuguese motorways.
Her talk, "From an open call to the open road," traced the full journey: how a Korean road-AI startup and Portugal's leading motorway operator found a shared problem, built a solution together, and proved it on live traffic.
A shared commitment to detecting road incidents faster brought Dareesoft and Brisa together.
An application sent hours before the deadline
In 2025, Brisa and Plug and Play opened the first Ahead Start call for road safety, mobility and infrastructure. Brisa's challenge was easy to say and hard to solve: how can we spot incidents faster, across the whole network, beyond the reach of fixed cameras?
Fun fact: we applied on the very last day, hours before the open call closed.
Our answer was simple. Brisa's patrol vehicles already drive the network every day. Turn each one into a moving AI sensor, and let it detect five critical incident types in real time: accidents, stopped vehicles, people on the road, objects or animals on the road, and wrong-way drivers.
DareeSoft was selected for the first edition. At the Pre-Demo Day in Lisbon on 28 May 2025, Betty spent the whole evening with Brisa's teams on one question: how do you find incidents faster? At Demo Day at Brisa HQ, we pitched it. A year later, what we pitched is what we delivered.
The Dareesoft–Brisa journey, from the Ahead Start open call to a live motorway pilot.
Dareesoft CEO Betty Row shares the company’s collaboration with Brisa at Ahead Start 2026 Corporate Innovation Day.
Six months on Portuguese motorways
From 28 January to 31 July 2026, DareeSoft's ARA-30 edge-AI dashcams rode on five Brisa patrol vehicles across three operation centres (Carcavelos, Leiria and Carregado). Together they covered about 395 km of motorway on the A1, A5, A9 and A10, roughly 30% of the Brisa network, and collected more than one million real road images, every one anonymised before storage.
An overview of the AI incident detection pilot across Brisa’s motorway network.
Road to control room in under a minute
The dashcam captures the road. The edge AI inside the device flags candidate incidents instantly. In the cloud, a larger model and our Vision-Language Model re-check the whole scene, which is what cuts false alarms. Faces and licence plates are masked before anything is stored, and the operator receives the alert with the image, map position, road, weather and time on the RoadKeeper dashboard.
How Dareesoft’s edge and cloud AI support incident detection, verification and alerts.
Learning Portugal's roads, together
A real pilot surprises you. Many accidents in Portugal are minor: no visible damage, just a stopped car and people around it. Our detector alone missed most of them. Adding a Vision-Language Model that reads the whole scene lifted accident recall from 12% to 82%, and missed accidents dropped from 15 to 3.
Motorcyclists, rare on Korean motorways, were at first flagged as people on the road. We fed those images back as negative training data and the false alerts disappeared. Brisa's teams even staged accident scenarios with us on the motorway to help the AI learn. That is real partnership.
Dareesoft and Brisa collaborated to improve AI performance in Portuguese road conditions.
Six months. Proven results.
Measured on Brisa-only test data and in live operation, the results speak for themselves: the median alert delay fell from 12 minutes 30 seconds to 55 seconds, 92% faster. 93.7% of live alerts were operationally correct, 2,888 incidents were detected live, and not a single licence plate was missed by our anonymisation.
Key results from the Dareesoft–Brisa incident detection pilot.
What Ahead Start gave us
Ahead Start opened a door into Europe, gave us a real-world testbed on Portuguese motorways, and made true co-creation possible with the operators who use our product every day. Most of all, it gave us a validated European reference to share with road operators worldwide.
Ahead Start enabled real-world testing and collaboration with Brisa’s road operations teams.
For the next startup joining Ahead Start, Betty shared three lessons from the journey.
Three lessons from Dareesoft’s Ahead Start journey.
Obrigada, Brisa!
What we set out to prove, we proved together. Thank you to the Brisa teams in Carcavelos, Leiria and Carregado, the Brisa Innovation team, and Plug and Play for making this journey possible. Our next stop: from 4 motorways to the whole network.
Thank you to Brisa and Plug and Play for their partnership and support throughout the journey.
