Boston Globe · November 26, 2025
How a company uses AI to . . . fix potholes
The Boston Globe's Spencer Buell profiled the Somerville company making inroads at public works departments across the country with LiDAR and AI.
SOMERVILLE — A lot can go wrong with a road. A tiny crack spreads. Water leeches in, then freezes, and thaws. Pavement buckles. Chunks come loose. New England weather prevails. Before you know it, you've got a pothole.
Preventing these things, and patching them up, is a battle that public works employees have waged for generations. Now, according to a Somerville company called CYVL that has been making inroads at public works departments across the country, there is a better way to keep it all straight: LiDAR, which uses lasers to create three-dimensional maps, and AI.
“People like to bash on public works and say, ‘Why is my road always bad?’ But they don't have the best tools to solve these problems today. They're relying on these manual methods. Now, we've cracked that code with technology.”
Daniel Pelaez, CYVL's 27-year-old chief executive
