Nauto, an autonomous vehicle technology company, has raised $159 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Greylock Partners and a subsidiary of the SoftBank Group Corp. Other participants in this funding round included previous investors like BMW iVentures, Toyota AI Ventures, General Motors Ventures, and the venture unit of Allianz Group, apart from investors like Draper Nexus and Playground Global who had invested in the Series A round of funding.
Nauto is an autonomous vehicle technology company renowned for its AI system and data platform which is enhancing fleet safety. The Nauto unit comprises of an after-market dual-camera device, which has inbuilt features for safety and networking. The Nauto intelligent vehicle hardware helps prevent collisions, helps improve driver behavior, and learns continuously from the data that is shared across its network.
The Nauto 2 system has an intelligent hardware which can be mounted on the windshield. The hardware is powered by computer vision and deep learning algorithms and is connected through a smart cloud network which is kept informed and updated by all the other Nautos being used.
The Nauto units automatically capture significant events and upload the video to the platform. The platform keeps getting updated about the drivers, the roads, and the conditions around the vehicles that are using the Nauto unit and network. As more and more Nauto units are used in vehicles, the self-learning platform will gain more and more understanding of the driving behavior of humans, and this continuous information will help improve the accuracy of the Nauto platform's insights, which will, therefore, enhance fleet operations and safety.
"At a time when traffic fatalities are climbing and distracted driving causes more than half of all crashes, we're tackling that problem by putting Nauto's safety features into more commercial fleet vehicles — from trucks and vans to buses and passenger cars — to warn drivers and coach them on how to stay focused," says Stefan Heck, CEO, Nauto. "And, in pursuit of the profoundly transformational impact autonomous vehicle technology can have on business and society, we'll now more rapidly be able to gather the billions more miles of real driving experience and data required to get a precise understanding of how the best drivers behave behind the wheel."
Along with the investment, Reid Hoffman from Greylock Partners and Shu Nyatta from SoftBank will join Nauto's board. They will join Stefan Heck (CEO), Karen C. Francis (Ford, GM) and Bruce Leak (Playground Global), the other existing Nauto board members.
"In the future, driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge," says Reid Hoffman. "By building a network of vehicles and drivers, Nauto is accelerating the transition from a human-driver dominant world to a safer, more efficient autonomous-driving era."
"While building an increasingly intelligent telematics business, Nauto is also generating a highly valuable dataset for autonomous driving, at massive scale," says Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO, SoftBank Group Corp. "This data will help accelerate the development and adoption of safe, effective self-driving technology."
Nauto plans to invest the funds raised in the growth and deployment of its retrofitted safety and networking system. It also plans to expand the Nauto data platform to enable research and development in autonomous vehicles across multiple automakers.
