Motorq closes $7 million series a funding round; Launches suite of fleet management intelligence tools

Motorq, the connected car API company, has closed a $7 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Story Ventures with participation from existing investors FM Capital and Monta Vista Capital and a new strategic investor Avanta Ventures, the investment arm of CSAA, a AAA Insurer. The company also unveiled a suite of fleet management intelligence tools designed to help fleet owners and managers reduce cost, increase efficiency and improve overall fleet management.

“Today there are 560 million supercomputers on wheels across the U.S. and Europe generating hundreds of millions of terabytes of untapped, business critical data each year,” said Arun Rajagopalan, Co-founder and CEO of Motorq. “We are building the platform and toolset needed to extract, analyze and make sense of this data for fleet owners today and ultimately for consumers tomorrow.”

Motorq’s cloud-based system ingests and monitors embedded data from a vehicle’s onboard computers, runs advanced analytics and machine learning models, contextualizes the insights with other information sets and delivers those insights to customers via application programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools. Datapoints include vehicle location, charge/fuel use, driver behavior, safety warnings, maintenance alerts, certain remote commands, and other important information.

The company’s new suite of tools include Pre-Delivery Tracking, Full Vehicle Portal, V3 API Access, Snowflake Data Lake Integration, and many others.

Motorq is initially focused on deploying the platform into the business fleet and dealer markets, where business owners can use the data to increase safety, efficiency and become more profitable. Fleet owners can easily customize analytics and reporting options and also integrate the insights into their own applications and workflows.

Long term, Motorq envisions a world where consumers also benefit from a connected vehicle ecosystem of features, data, information and applications.

“Much like Twilio made it easy for rich applications to be built on top of communications services, and just as Plaid connected legacy financial systems with emerging new banking and payment apps, Motorq is the platform connecting vehicle manufacturers, dealers, owners and service providers,” said Rajagopalan.

Key to Motorq’s goal of creating this global connected vehicle platform is its success in securing developer agreements with auto manufacturers. Today, Motorq is the leading integration platform for global OEM’s. With relationships with seven of the top 10 global leaders covering 21 brands, Motorq is able to quickly and securely connect to and provision information from more than 32 million vehicles, a number that is increasing each day. Having direct access to vehicle data streams across disparate manufacturers is not just a prerequisite for a scalable platform, it’s also extremely difficult and time consuming.

“We’ve been impressed with Motorq’s ability to continue to sign deals with both leading automotive manufacturers and fleet management companies,” said Brian Yormak at Story Ventures. “By simplifying data capture and by providing rich data insights, Motorq enables fleet managers and dealer services providers to make better decisions that reduce cost, increase efficiency and boost the bottom line. We believe this is the right first step on Motorq’s journey to a much bigger vision for a connected vehicle platform.”