PALO ALTO — Motorq, a connected car API company, has raised $40 million in its Series B round of funding. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors including Story Ventures, FM Capital, Monta Vista Capital and Avanta Ventures. Funding will be used to grow the product development and engineering teams, increase collaboration with the automotive OEMs, establish sales and business development in Europe and Japan and enhance the core Motorq platform for new markets, including insurance, automotive rental, and dealer services.
Motorq’s cloud-based system ingests and monitors embedded data from a vehicle’s onboard computers, runs advanced analytics and machine learning models, contextualizes the insights with other information sets and delivers those insights to customers via application programming interfaces (APIs) and other infrastructure tools.
Today, Motorq is the leading integration platform for global OEMs. With relationships with the top 10 global automotive leaders covering 21 brands, Motorq can quickly and securely connect to and provision information from more than 51 million vehicles, a number that is increasing each day. It also has partnerships with 8 of the 10 largest fleet management companies.
“The increasing ubiquity of connected vehicles creates an unprecedented opportunity for growth for a range of industries,” said Arun Rajagopalan, Co-founder and CEO of Motorq. “With fresh capital from Insight Partners and others to support our core strategy, we are uniquely prepared to deliver insights from data that can reduce costs and boost efficiencies for fleets, optimize auto rental fleet management, revolutionize underwriting for insurance, and deliver new revenue opportunities for OEMs and dealers.”
“The data produced by connected cars is applicable to many use cases across the vehicle lifecycle. Motorq is uniquely positioned to provide access to connected car data from all of the major OEMs,” said John True, Operating Partner at Insight Partners. “Their focus on delivering business value from connected vehicles has resulted in triple-digit year over year growth, and Motorq’s building technology agreements with OEMs puts them on a path to becoming a leader in the industry. We look forward to partnering with the Motorq team as they continue to grow and Scale Up.” John will join the Motorq board.
Motorq’s platform creates a range of information designed to help fleet managers improve efficiency, reduce costs, decrease waste, including:
- Pre vehicle delivery tracking. Know where a vehicle is, in real time, from the moment it leaves the factory floor.
- Geofencing. Set geographical parameters for vehicle travel to make sure they go only where they are supposed to, ensuring efficiency, fuel use, and compliance with company policy.
- Complete trip analysis. Observe and evaluate daily routes to ensure drivers are efficient.
- Complete driver analysis. Track and analyze risky driver behavior, including speeding, harsh braking/acceleration, seat belt use, etc.
- Driver coaching. Use in-vehicle coaching for real-time audible warnings, reminders, and suggestions for safe driving to prevent accidents before they happen.
- EV charging insights. Get the most out of EV batteries by optimizing your routes based on geography, temperature, traffic, and other variables that impact range.
- Fuel misuse reporting. Automatically detect when fueling amounts don’t match starting fuel levels in vehicles to prevent fuel card misuse.
- Maintenance alerts. Keep on top of basic maintenance and get ahead of costly repairs by automated reports of issues or recommended servicing.
- World-class consent management. Control privacy and the opt-in and opt-out of vehicles based on driver and owner consent.
