How do businesses that operate fleets of commercial vehicles work towards improved road safety, greater efficiency and reduced insurance premiums? LightMetrics, a Californian start-up that is today announcing an $8.5 million funding round, thinks video telematics could play a crucial role.
It has been possible for some time to equip vehicles with GPS-enabled black boxes, which monitor the way the vehicle is being driven. Is the driver prone to speeding, for example, or to sudden braking or acceleration? Where and when do they drive?
Such technology provides a stream of data that can help drivers understand how to change their behaviours for the better – to drive more safely, for example, or to use fuel more efficiently. The data can also be useful to third parties such as insurers, which can use it to assess risk more accurately – and to commercial fleet managers, who can use it to ensure their drivers are safe and efficient.
However, Soumik Ukil, co-founder and CEO of LightMetrics, believes these conventional telematics products provide an incomplete picture. “They are useful, but they won’t necessarily pick up every problematic behaviour, and they don’t offer context,” he says.
Telematics technology won’t tell you, for example, whether a driver is too close to the vehicle in front, or whether they are distracted – perhaps by a mobile phone. Nor will it provide an explanation for a potentially risky behaviour: a driver may have braked sharply because they were heading towards a junction too quickly, say, or simply because a car has suddenly pulled out in front of them.
LightMetrics therefore believes video will be the next frontier for the $76 billion telematics industry. Its RideView technology adds a dashcam to the telematics package, with a camera that monitors both the driver and the road ahead. The video feed can be matched to the telematics data, providing a far richer understanding of the driver’s behaviour. The solution will also issue alerts when it detects a risky behaviour – speeding, say, or a driver not paying attention to the road.
“We’re scanning the road and the driver in real time,” explains Ukil. “It’s like having a virtual assistant who is sitting next to the driver.” The data generated by the system is also available to the fleet manager, who can draw drivers’ attention to problematic issues at appraisals and performance reviews – or more immediately if there is a serious worry.
LightMetrics partners with established telematics providers, an approach that has seen it grow quickly. Its technology has now been deployed into more than 2,000 commercial vehicle fleets worldwide, with the company’s revenues growing threefold over the course of 2022. It’s also focusing on partnerships with insurers, which could use the technology to assess risk more accurately – but also to increase claims efficiency, since video provides an instant account of what has happened in an accident where fault might otherwise be disputed.
The early results from deployments are encouraging. Data from in-vehicle systems suggest they can reduce risky behaviours such as speeding and distracted driving b up to 80% and 70% respectively. That should mean far fewer accidents – and, in time, reduced insurance premiums for fleet operators.
LightMetrics founders Soumik Ukil, Pushkar Patwardhan, Mithun Uliyar, Gururaj Putraya, Ravi Shenoy … [+]
Nevertheless, Ukil believes LightMetrics – and video-enabled telematics – is only just getting going. “This is going to be a technology that is everywhere,” he says. “For now, we’re only scratching the surface.” Millions of organisations operate commercial vehicle fleets, he points out, from very large businesses to small and medium-sized enterprises. There is even the potential to expand into the personal vehicle market.
LightMetrics’ fundraising will be important in this regard. The $8.5 million is coming from the venture capital provider Sequoia Capital India, which has taken encouragement from market projections suggesting sales of video telematics solutions could grow at a rate of 16.5% over the next three years. “Video telematics is the fastest growing segment of the telematics industry,” says Ashish Agrawal, Managing Director of Sequoia India. “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.”
The cash will be used for further investment in product innovation, as LightMetrics continues to use artificial intelligence tools to increase the sophistication of its RideView solution. The company will also invest in its go-to-market resources, focusing on further partnerships with telematics providers, insurers and automotive manufacturers.
“Video is going to be the new GPS,” says Ukil, who expects this technology to become ubiquitous for fleet operators. “We need to make sure it spreads far and wide.”
