Pittsburgh-based RoadBotics is in the early stage of developing a market for a low-cost, smartphone-based monitoring solution that assesses road conditions for municipalities and contractors. The Carnegie Mellon University spinout plans to make a formal announcement in January once it has closed on an initial round of funding, says CEO Mark DeSantis.

The tool addresses the problem of maintaining some 2.6 million miles of roads in the country at an annual cost of $8,000 to $10,000 per mile, he explains. There’s an increasingly urgent need to understand how to manage these assets while reducing the skyrocketing cost of repairing them.