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Eran Shir started as a theoretical physicist studying black holes. Then he helped build Israel’s Arrow missile unit. Then he crowdsourced a map of the internet. Then he sold an AI company to Yahoo.
And somehow, that was all before Nexar.
In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman Eraqi sits down with Eran Shir, co-founder of Nexar, for a conversation about one of the hardest frontiers in AI: making machines understand the physical world.
Not the clean, predictable world of demos.
The real world.
The one with bad drivers, potholes, snowstorms, unicycles, kids chasing balls into the street, broken stop signs, fleet operators, latency constraints, cheap edge devices, and edge cases that can kill people.
Nexar began with a deceptively simple question:
What if your phone camera could see the road the way Waze sees traffic?
That idea became a network of hundreds of thousands of connected vehicles, collecting billions of miles of real-world driving data every year — including tens of millions of rare, weird, dangerous, impossible-to-stage scenarios.
Eran explains why the future of autonomy is not only about better algorithms. It is about data density, edge intelligence, economics, and the messy long tail of reality.
He also shares the story behind BADASS 2.0, Nexar’s world model for collision prediction, explainability, planning, and risk avoidance — and why its behavior outside driving scenarios surprised even the team that built it.
In this episode, we cover:
• Why Eran calls himself a “failed physicist”
• How Israel’s Arrow missile program shaped his thinking about speed, constraints, and execution
• Why crowdsourcing became the recurring pattern of his career
• The difference between AI in the cloud and AI in the physical world
• Why autonomous driving is a “where” question, not a “when” question
• How Nexar built a real-world vision network across hundreds of thousands of vehicles
• Why edge cases matter more than average cases
• The economics of collecting road data when other companies spend millions to get it
• Why some automakers were further behind than outsiders realized
• What BADASS 2.0 can do — and why it may generalize beyond cars
• How AI is changing what it means to manage, build, and lead inside a company
• Why Eran believes everyone is becoming a manager of agents
• What founders underestimate about hardware, autonomy, and human adaptability
This is a conversation about roads, physics, AI, defense systems, drones, startups, and the strange moment we are entering. Where software no longer just understands text.
It is starting to understand motion, risk, and the world itself.
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#Autonomy #ComputerVision #PhysicalAI #Mobility #Startups
