Two-year-old Nauto, a Silicon Valley company focusing on artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles has received additional funding from BMW, GM and Toyota. The total Series B round came it at $159 million, with additional funding from Japanese telecommunications company Softbank Group Corp. and Greylock Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
That funding, announced Wednesday, will bolster the company’s effort on its “retrofit safety and networking system into more vehicles around the globe.” In addition, the company will expand its data collection platform for autonomous vehicles.
“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,” stated Nauto founder and CEO Stefan Heck in a press release. “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.”
Nauto describes its product as “ an automotive data platform, powered by artificial intelligence and an after-market dual-camera device, which can equip any vehicle or fleet with sophisticated safety and networking features.”
