KeepTruckin gets $190 million to invest in AI products and expands its research and development team to 700 people
According to CEO Shoaib Makani, KeepTruckin, a hardware and software development that helps trucking fleets manage vehicle, cargo, and driver safety, has just raised $190 million in a Series E fundraising round, valuing the company at over $2 billion.
Greenoaks Capital, Index Ventures, IVP, and Scale Venture Partners, as well as funds administered by BlackRock, participated in the round, as did G2 Venture Partners, which recently launched a $500 million fund to assist modernise current industries.
KeepTruckin plans to reinvest its new capital in AI-powered products such as GPS tracking, ELD compliance, dispatch and workflow, but it’s especially interested in improving its smart dashcam, which, according to Makani, detects unsafe driving behaviours like cell phone distraction and close following in real time and alerts the drivers.
Usher Transport, one of the firm’s clients, claims that after installing the Smart Dashcam, DRIVE risk score, and Safety Hub, solutions that the company offers to improve safety, it has experienced a 32 percent annual reduction in accidents.
Makani told TechCrunch, “KeepTruckin’s secret sauce is that we can develop complex models (that other edge cameras can’t yet run) and execute them on the edge with low-power, low-memory, and low-bandwidth constraints.” “We created in-house Ips to handle this challenge in a variety of environments, including poor light, extreme weather, occluded subjects, and distortions.”
According to a 2020 McKinsey report, the freight business is unlikely to grow at the same rate as last year, which was 30% greater than the previous year, but some industries will develop at a faster rate than others. Commodities tied to e-commerce, as well as agricultural and food products, will be the first to expand again, whereas electronics and automobile will grow more slowly as consumer demand for non-essentials declines.
KeepTruckin anticipates this demand to grow, and plans to utilise the new funding to expand quickly and hire more talent to further advance its AI systems, including expanding its R&D team to 700 people worldwide, with a focus on engineering, machine vision, data science, and other AI fields, according to Makani.
“We believe it is vital to package these goods into operator-friendly user interfaces for individuals who aren’t extremely technical,” Makani added. “Front-end and full-stack engineers with experience designing incredibly intuitive mobile and web applications are also a high priority.”
