Zendrive, a company that uses data analytics to make roads safer, on Thursday said it has raised $37 million in Series B funding led by XL Innovate, with participation from Hearst Ventures and existing investors including ACME Capital, BMW iVentures, NYCA, and SignalFire.
Zendrive said the funding will help it continue to build up its mobile driving safety solution and strengthen its global team to deepen its focus on the insurance market.
“Zendrive was founded to make roads safe with data and analytics. As we enter this phase of the business, we are excited to continue to push the innovation curve forward and align with partners who are similarly committed to improving driving behaviour using technology and incentives,” said Zendrive chief executive officer and co-founder Jonathan Matus.
The company has offices in San Francisco and Bangalore. The research and development centre headquartered in Bengaluru since 2014 has data scientists, engineers, and product teams, working towards developing solutions to road safety problems.
“Our world-class team of data scientists and engineers are building technology that reduces collisions, improves road risks, and ultimately saves lives,” said Pankaj Risbood, Zendrive’s technical co-founder. “It’s of utmost importance that we invest in our teams as they tackle important technical challenges that also have a direct social impact.”
The company also announced the launch of FullStop, a mobile-powered risk solution designed for automobile insurance companies that helps track road violations. The company claims to have analysed more than 180 billion miles covered by drivers till date.
FullStop offers predictive capabilities on metrics such as speeding and aggressive acceleration showing that drivers who violate at least one stop sign per month are up to 5.8 times more likely to crash and have higher rates of T-bone and head-on collisions than non-aggressive drivers.
This, the company said, cannot be achieved with traditional telematics data.
“No one ever imagined that smartphone sensors could detect stop sign violations, without dedicated hardware such as dash-mounted cameras. Zendrive’s data science capabilities are pushing the envelope from what’s conceivable to what’s now currently possible,” said Tom Hutton, managing partner, XL Innovate.
Source: Mint