SoftBank Vision Fund (SBVF) has made a $500-million investment in global mobile telematics and analytics provider Cambridge Mobile Telematics, according to a company statement.
Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, CMT aims to improve the safety of people and goods using mobile sensing and IoT, AI, and behavioural science.
The company claims to have pioneered several innovations since its inception in 2010. Among them are its deployment of a service to efficiently gather and process sensory data from phones for auto insurance, the use of phone sensors to measure phone distraction, and induce better driving with gamification.
Since 2016, CMT has introduced new services for crash reconstruction and loss notification with telematics data, dashcam video analytics for risk scoring, fleet features for commercial insurance, and best-in-class risk scoring models.
Today, CMT’s DriveWell platform is used by leading insurers, fleets, cellular carriers, and other organizations in more than 20 countries, improving safety for millions of mobile users.
The company said the new investment will accelerate the adoption of its DriveWell platform and will also fuel CMT’s growth in automated crash and claims management, video analytics, and safety for emerging vehicle and mobility systems.
“Our rapid growth has been fueled by a culture that values collaboration with our customers and invests in research to improve our solutions and develop new products. This partnership with the Vision Fund is the start of the next stage of our journey to bring safe mobility solutions for people and goods at massive scale,” said CMT Chairman and CTO Hari Balakrishnan.
The investment in CMT is the latest significant investment made by SoftBank Vision Fund announced this month. The most notable of them is the fund’s lead investment in the $1.1 billion funding round of Indonesian e-commerce unicorn Tokopedia.
The fund is also investing $2 billion in South Korean online retailer Coupang and has led a $400 million round in California-based robot-powered microbe factory Zymergen Inc.
SoftBank Vision Fund invests $100 million or more in growth stage leading companies. Sectors that the fund invests in include: internet-of-things, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, communications infrastructure, telecoms, computational biology, biotech, cloud technologies and software, consumer internet businesses, financial technology, and mobile apps.
According to a recent amended SEC filing, the fund has raised a total of approximately $98.58 billion from 14 investors since its first sale on May 20, 2017.
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