Video Demonstration by Omar Ahmad
Background
In 2017 while in high school, Omar developed a way to enter cars with smartphones without using car keys.
The initial goal of CarBe is for personal car owners to benefit from not having to carry keys around. Digitizing car keys allows car owners to share access to their friends and family, as well as monetize their car when not in use.
Implications for car fleet owners include not having to track multiple copies of keys for their large fleet sizes. Fleet owners can further streamline their customer experience by allowing customers to skip the counter and access the car from their smartphone.
Besides the personal car owner and fleet owner benefits, car manufacturers can offer subscription based ownership/access to their cars as an alternative to long-term leasing and financing. Customers could access cars for short periods of time, park them in a designated spot, and switch out for a different model or brand. This would bring the Subscription-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to car ownership by eliminating the need for key hand offs.
All of these proposed use cases are centered around the future of mobility, in which, auto manufacturers can implement CarBe's model in their cars' central locking systems for the future of autonomous robotaxis.
Development
Here’s what the futures going to look like:
Autonomous ride-sharing (“robotaxis”) are self driving cars that are hailed from a smartphone and bring a user from point A to point B, all completed without a driver. In order for this to happen, there would need to be an authentication step before the user steps into the car. This is where CarBe's technology proves to be sustainable.
What are the alternatives to CarBe?
(A) Having the user press unlock in the app — this would cause a delay since the signal would need to transmit to the server before reaching the car. This delay could be exacerbated by network issues especially in cities or parking garages.
(B) Alternatively if the app’s unlock button used Bluetooth, this would allow for a large physical radius to which the car could unlock. This would mean bystanders can enter the car before the authorized user.
(C) Facial recognition in the door of the car would require registering all users personal biometrics in the companies servers. Not only does this raise privacy concerns, this would have many logistical steps to register all users biometrics and integrate biometric scanners in the body of the car.
(D) Providing users with NFC/RFID cards that allow them access into the car would remove the need for the smartphone, but doesn’t meet the level of security that an NFC enabled smartphone with biometric authentication does since physical cards can be traded between individuals.
Based off these main concepts, Omar engineered a solution for unlocking a car using an NFC-enabled smartphone with biometric authentication. Omar took inspiration from payment technologies and biometric authentication in smartphones that were rapidly adopted in 2017.
Patents and Intellectual Property
Omar solely authored a utility non-provisional patent application in 2018 and the USPTO granted it. He authored another utility non-provisional patent application in 2019 to include more cases for implementations, which the USPTO granted as well. As of spring 2023, Omar has initiated the process of selling his patents to a global smartphone manufacturer.
Patent 1: US 10,343,650
"NFC system for unlocking a vehicle via smartphone biometric authentication"
"NFC system for unlocking a vehicle via smartphone biometric authentication"
Patent 2: US 10,604,115
"NFC system for unlocking a vehicle via smartphone biometric authentication"
"NFC system for unlocking a vehicle via smartphone biometric authentication"
Google Patents Link
Pitch and Venture Capital
Throughout the development of CarBe, Omar pitched to the C-Suite of Fortune 500 companies, managing partners at venture capital firms (located in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York City, Washington D.C., New York City, Austin), directors of accelerators and incubators, and pitch competitions. Noteably, Omar brokered many of these connections by cold-calling/emailing as well as through a generous introductions from someone he had previously cold-called.