The streets of the United States are very dangerous for pedestrians. A startup called Obvio in San Carlos, California, believes that this can be changed by installing a camera on a stop sign—the founder also said that the Panopticon solution would not be created.

It's a bold claim when other companies are criticizing how their license plate reading cameras become a key tool for highly surveillance status.

The obvious founders Ali Rehan and Dhruv Maheshwari think they can build a big enough business without indulging in the worst impulse. They have designed the product through surveillance and data sharing restrictions to ensure they can follow that claim.

They found a deep pocket willing to trust them. The company has just completed a $22 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Oppio plans to use the funds to expand to the top five cities currently operating in Maryland.

Rehan and Maheshwari met while working at Motive, which makes dashboard cameras for the trucking industry. There, Maheshwari told TechCrunch, the two realized that “many other ordinary passenger cars are bad drivers.”

The founders say the more they pay attention to road safety. Not only are streets and crosswalks becoming increasingly dangerous to pedestrians, but in their eyes, the United States is also lagging behind law enforcement.

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"In fact, most other countries are excellent," Maheshwari said. "They have speed camera technology. They have a good driving safety culture. The United States is actually the worst in all modern countries."

Maheshwari and Rehan began to study road safety by reading books and attending meetings. They found that people in the industry were attracted to three general solutions: education, engineering, and law enforcement.

In their eyes, these methods are usually too separate. It is difficult to quantify the impact of education. Local officials may try to solve problematic intersections by installing roundabouts, but that can take years of work and millions of dollars. Law enforcement cannot camp on every stop sign.

Rehan and Maheshwari see hope to bring them together.

The result is a tower (usually in color) with a solar camera on it that can be installed near almost any intersection. Its purpose is not a part of the integration - an educational and awareness aspect - it is also carefully designed for cheap and easy to install.

The device's AI was trained to detect the worst stop signs or other violations. (The company also claims on its website that it can capture speeding, crosswalk violations, illegal turns, unsafe lane changes, and even distracting driving.) When one of these things happens, the system matches the car's license plate with the state's DMV database.

All this information - the accuracy of the violation, the accuracy of the license plate - is verified by Oberio employees or contractors before sending it to law enforcement, and the violation must be reviewed before issuing the citation.

Obpio provides technology to municipalities for free and makes money from citations. Maheshwari said provisions on such agreements vary by state and how the citation revenue will be distributed between obvious local and governments.

This obviously creates a motivation to increase the number of citations. But Rehan and Maheshwari said they could build a business around the worst crime in American cities. They also said they want to be clearly retained in the community using their technology and be able to respond.

“Automatic enforcement should be used with community advocacy and community support, which shouldn’t be the camera you put in to grab revenue(s) and Gotchas,” Maheshwari said. The goal is to “start with these cameras in a way that warns and stops the most shocking drivers (so) you can actually create community-wide support and behavioral changes.”

Maheshwari said cities and their citizens “need to trust us.”

There is also a technical explanation of why Oblio's cameras may not be an overwhelming surveillance tool for law enforcement.

Obvio's camera tower records and processes its video locally. The lens leaves the device only if the violation is found. Otherwise, all other vehicles and pedestrians stayed on the device through the lens of a given intersection for about 12 hours before they could be deleted. (The video is also remotely accessible by the municipality.)

This does not eliminate the opportunity for law enforcement to use videotape to monitor citizens in other ways. But this does reduce the chances.

This focus is what drove Bain Capital Risk Partner Ajay Agarwal to invest in Obvio.

"Yes, in the short term, you can maximize profits and erode those values, but over time it will limit the company's ability to be everywhere. It will create enemies or create people who don't want this," he told TechCrunch. "Great founders are willing to sacrifice the entire business and a lot of revenue in the pursuit of the final mission."