Kognic Wins AutoTech Breakthrough Award for Autonomous Vehicle Innovation

Leading Annotation Platform for Autonomy Data Recognized for Advancing Safety-Critical AI Systems

October 9, 2024 – San Jose, California – Kognic, the price leader in autonomy data annotation, today announced that it has been selected as winner of the AutoTech Breakthrough Award for "Autonomous Vehicle Innovation of the Year."

Kognic enables automotive OEMs and technology companies to integrate cost-efficient, scalable human feedback into their data pipelines—accelerating the development of autonomous systems that are safe, reliable, and aligned with human expectations. The company's unique combination of Platform, Process, and People delivers the most annotated autonomy data per dollar, making Kognic the price leader in sensor-fusion annotation.

"Machines learn faster with human feedback," said Daniel Langkilde, CEO and Co-Founder at Kognic. "As the autonomy industry scales, the bottleneck isn't just collecting data—it's turning human judgment into high-quality, auditable signals that machines can learn from. Kognic solves this by making human feedback as productive as possible for the hardest, richest, and most safety-critical data in the world."

The AutoTech Breakthrough Awards recognize excellence and innovation in transportation and automotive technology. Administered by Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform, the awards honor top companies, services, and products across comprehensive categories including Autonomous Driving Technology. Previous winners include Wayve, the UK-based company pioneering embodied AI for autonomous driving.

"Kognic is helping global automotive OEMs and Tier 1/Tier 2 suppliers accelerate their ADAS and autonomous driving programs," said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director, AutoTech Breakthrough. "Their platform addresses one of the industry's most critical challenges: access to cost-efficient, reliable, and scalable human feedback for increasingly complex datasets."

Kognic's annotation platform optimizes multi-modal autonomy data by integrating sensor inputs from cameras, LiDAR, and radar through intuitive interfaces designed for complex 3D sequences. The platform combines intelligent automation, guided workflows, and domain expertise to minimize the time required to turn scarce human judgment into training-ready data. Kognic's customers include leading technology providers such as Qualcomm, Bosch, Continental, and Zenseact, which power ADAS and autonomous driving systems for global OEMs including BMW and Volvo Cars.

"No matter how powerful foundation models become, they must be guided, validated, and aligned with human judgment," explained Langkilde. "Machines that move among us must not only avoid collisions—they must behave in ways that feel safe, polite, and consistent with human expectations. These are values that cannot be derived from physics alone. That's why human feedback will always be essential to autonomy, and why Kognic remains focused on making it as productive and cost-efficient as possible."