Exwayz is a Paris-based software company founded in 2021 by chief executive Hassan Bouchiba with Mathias Corsia and Antoine Plat. It came up through the CentraleSupélec engineering-school ecosystem and the 21st accelerator at Station F, and remains small and lightly funded: a €1m round closed in November 2025, led by CentraleSupélec Venture and topped up by an i-Lab innovation grant under the France 2030 programme.
It sells no vehicles and no sensors. Its product is localisation software, 3D lidar SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping), that lets an existing industrial vehicle work out where it is, to claimed centimetre precision, without GPS. The company says its software has logged thousands of operating hours on commercial robot fleets, with more than 20 clients across five continents.
The problem Exwayz addresses is prosaic and real. Satellite positioning fails precisely where industrial autonomy is most valuable: under container cranes, between stacked boxes, inside warehouses and tunnels. Exwayz's software first builds a 3D map of a site from lidar data, then matches live lidar returns against that map in real time on the vehicle's own embedded computer, producing a position the company puts at roughly a centimetre in accuracy and a tenth of a degree in orientation. It is deliberately hardware-agnostic, working with lidar units from SICK, Velodyne, Ouster, Luminar, Hesai and Valeo — the retrofit pitch is that a terminal tractor or yard truck keeps its existing drivetrain and gains autonomy-grade positioning.
Two reference points stand out. As a technical partner to the Indy Autonomous Challenge in 2024, its localisation ran on autonomous race cars at more than 150mph, an unforgiving test of latency. More commercially, the Swiss autonomous-truck firm Embotech uses Exwayz SLAM in its port and logistics vehicles, and a fleet of 30 autonomous terminal trucks powered by the two firms is planned to enter service at the Port of Rotterdam in 2026. The accuracy figures are the company's own; Rotterdam, once operating, will be the public test.
This relevance is prospective, not evidenced: no UK or Irish deployment has been announced. But the mapping is direct. British container terminals, Felixstowe, London Gateway, Southampton among them, present the same GPS-hostile canyons of stacked steel as Rotterdam, and the retrofit model matters in a market where terminal operators are reluctant to replace vehicle fleets wholesale to gain automation.
Airside logistics is the other natural fit: baggage and cargo tugs run repetitive routes across aprons where satellite coverage degrades near terminal buildings, and where a software-plus-existing-lidar approach lowers the cost of a trial. Dublin Port's tightly constrained estate poses a similar positioning problem. If autonomous terminal tractors prove out at Rotterdam, the software layer is the portable part — it can move to a new port far faster than vehicles can.
The near-term signal is Rotterdam: whether the 30-truck Embotech fleet enters revenue service in 2026, and what its operators report about localisation reliability in bad weather and peak operations. For the UK and Irish connection to move from prospective to real, watch for a pilot with a terminal operator or a ground-handling firm on this side of the Channel.
The countervailing risks are scale and money: €1m is seed-scale finance for a company whose competition includes the in-house software teams of vehicle manufacturers, and some customer relationships cited in earlier reporting on the company could not be independently verified for this profile and are omitted. A larger round, or named UK-side integration partners, would settle whether Exwayz becomes a piece of port infrastructure or remains a promising component.
Sources: therobotreport.com · startupsmagazine.co.uk · techfundingnews.com
Entries are verified against primary sources. The bar is the frontier: first-of-kind, new technology, new materials — delivery milestones of conventional infrastructure, however large, do not qualify. The frontier is tracked globally; every entry states what it means for UK and Irish infrastructure.
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