AI-led video telematics startup LightMetrics raises $8.5M

Telematics startup Lightmetrics has raised $8.5 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, it said on Wednesday.

In a conversation with YourStory, Co-founder Soumik Ukil said the startup will use the funds to hire for and strengthen its tech team, as well as invest in marketing to telematic services companies, which are primarily its customers.

"We're partnered with 22 telematics services providers across North America, Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Around 2,500 fleet operators use our platform for more than 50,000 commercial vehicles," Ukil told YourStory.

LightMetrics is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Solutions (SaaS) platform that provides a layer of AI to dashcam recordings. Currently, it supports commercial vehicles.

The platform monitors and processes live footage from the dashcams of trucks and transport vehicles and uses AI to provide on-the-stop feedback on things like the speed of a vehicle, risky driving behaviour, hard braking etc, apart from recording accidents.

LightMetrics does not manufacture or sell cameras or any hardware of its own; instead, it has partnered with companies that manufacture dashcams or provide telemetry services.

The dashcams the platform integrates with have both, a road-facing camera, and a driver-facing camera. Using the latter, LightMetrics says it's able to process driver behaviour (such as drowsiness, using mobile phones while driving, and not watching the road carefully), as well as verify their identity. Using AI, the platform then corrects these behaviours and provides further in-cab coaching to encourage good practices while driving.

"Video telematics is the next GPS technology for vehicles," Ukil said.

Business model

LightMetrics is essentially a software platform. It does not have any hardware of its own, which was a conscious decision, Ukil said.

"We wanted to do the Android model where we would provide the software that could be used across different hardware."

The startup charges its channel partners a monthly recurring subscription fee for its platform, on a per-vehicle basis.

Currently, its biggest market is the US, where it initially launched.

For India, where road safety laws aren't as strictly adhered to as in the US, Ukil said the company has trained the AI on data from countries like Latin America where driving patterns are similar.

The startup is exploring providing similar services for personal vehicles, but its main focus remains commercial fleets.

Excluding its latest Series A round, LightMetrics has raised $1.89 million across six rounds, according to Tracxn. Its investors include Beenext.

The startup was founded in 2015 by Ukil, Ravi Shenoy, Mithun Uliyar, Gururaj Putraya, Pushkar Patwardhan and Krishna A.G, who had worked together at Nokia Research.

"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," said Ashish Agrawal, managing director at Sequoia India, in the company's press note.