Telematics startup Lightmetrics has raised $8.5 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, announced on Wednesday. LightMetrics is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Solutions (SaaS) platform that offers a layer of AI to dashcam recordings. Currently, it supports commercial vehicles.
Their solution uses cutting-edge AI to analyze video feeds from the cameras installed in cars to understand driver behavior better, prevent accidents, and improve safety.
With this fundraise, LightMetrics will focus on strengthening various teams to prepare for future growth. Engineering, customer success, product, marketing, sales, and analytics are all included in this.
The company will continue to invest in cutting-edge AI technologies, new products, and solutions to improve its offerings and provide fleets more value across all of its operations. The funds raised will also be used to explore similar opportunities, such as auto insurance.
Soumik Ukil, Ravi Shenoy, Mithun Uliyar, Gururaj Putraya, Pushkar Patwardhan, and Krishna A.G. founded LightMetrics in 2015. The founding team’s six members had previously worked on computer vision and machine learning for cameras at Nokia Research. While advancing smartphone photography technology was exciting, they wanted to use their computer vision and AI expertise for something more significant.
“This investment by Sequoia Capital India is a testament to the fact that we are building the preeminent video-based fleet safety platform globally. We will invest deeply in building the most advanced and efficient edge AI, empowering our customer base to deliver this critical technology across the entire fleet ecosystem, and expanding our international footprint,” said Soumik Ukil, CEO & Co-founder, LightMetrics.
Besides, LightMetrics has implemented a different go-to-market strategy. Instead of selling directly to fleets, it partners with telematics service providers and fleet management firms to upsell and incorporate the solution into its services for fleets. This prevents fragmentation and increases value by ensuring fleets receive a highly integrated offering with all the information they require about their business in one place. Partners who work with LightMetrics can either utilize the rebranded portal or use APIs to build their UI.
The company is hardware agnostic and does not sell cameras. It collaborates with camera manufacturers to provide clients and partners with a range of cameras in terms of capabilities and pricing points.
Due to a common backend, fleet customers have the same UI/UX irrespective of the hardware. As a result, with no engineering or product complexity on their end, LightMetrics’ customers and partners can customize solutions for particular customer segments and geographic regions.
Around 2500 fleets across India, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and South Africa use LightMetrics. Fleets using the LightMetrics’ powered video telematics have seen risky driving, such as speeding and distracted driving, drop by up to 80% and 70% in just a few months of onboarding. This highlights how a combination of in-cab coaching and offline coaching can significantly reduce the risk for fleets.
“Video telematics is the fastest growing segment of the telematics industry. Lightmetrics’ ability to deploy advanced computer vision models on the edge, across a range of dash cameras, enables it to serve all vehicle types in this large market. At Sequoia Capital India, we expect advancements in AI to transform several industries and are excited to partner with Lightmetrics on their quest to improve road safety,” said Ashish Agrawal, MD, Sequoia India.
