Telematics startup announced Wednesday that it has raised $8.5 million in a series A round led by Sequoia Capital India.
in a conversation with your storyco-founder Soumik Ukil said the startup will use the funding to invest in hiring and strengthening its technical team, as well as marketing to telematics service companies, which are primarily customers.
“We work with 22 telematics service providers in North America, Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Approximately 2,500 fleet operators use our platform for more than 50,000 commercial vehicles. said Ukil. your story.
LightMetrics is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Solutions (SaaS) platform that provides a layer of AI for dash cam recording. We currently support commercial vehicles.
The platform monitors and processes live footage from the dashcams of trucks and transport vehicles and uses AI to provide immediate feedback on vehicle speed, unsafe driving behavior, hard braking, etc., apart from recording accidents. provide to
LightMetrics does not manufacture or sell cameras or proprietary hardware. Instead, it partners with companies that make dashcams or provide telemetry services.
The in-vehicle cameras that the platform integrates include both road-facing and driver-facing cameras. LightMetrics says it can use the latter to process driver behavior (such as drowsiness, using a cell phone while driving, or not looking carefully at the road) to verify identity. The platform then uses AI to correct these behaviors and provide further coaching to encourage good practices while driving.
“Video telematics is the next GPS technology for vehicles,” said Ukil.
type of business
LightMetrics is essentially a software platform. Although it doesn’t have its own hardware, this was a conscious decision, Ukil said.
“We wanted to create an Android model that would provide software that could be used on a variety of hardware.”
The startup charges channel partners a monthly recurring subscription fee for the platform per vehicle.
Its largest market today is the United States, where it was first launched.
In the case of India, where road safety laws are not as strictly enforced as in the United States, Ukil said the company used data from countries such as Latin America that have similar driving patterns to train the AI.
The startup is looking to offer a similar service for private cars, but its main focus remains commercial vehicles.
Apart from the latest series A round, LightMetrics has raised $1.89 million in six rounds, according to Tracxn. Its investors include BeNext.
The startup was founded in 2015 by Ukil, Ravi Shenoy, Mithun Uliyar, Gururaj Putraya, Pushkar Patwardhan and Krishna AG who worked together at Nokia Research.
“Video telematics is the fastest growing segment in the telematics industry. Lightmetrics is able to deploy advanced computer vision models to the edge across a range of dash cameras to serve all types of vehicles in this large market. We can,” said Ashish Agrawal. Managing his Director of Sequoia India, the company’s press notes.