UK connected car startup in $1.1bn SPAC deal
The deal with Virtuoso Acquisition, a dedicated acquisition company, values the combination at $1.1bn and releases $330m for expansion for connected car data services.
Wejo provides the capability to connect directly to sensors in vehicles, enabling live insight and analytics for customers and auto manufacturer partners. Current investors include US data specialist Palantir and car makers General Motors.
The company is aiming to expand into traffic management, advertising, fleet management, insurance, remote diagnostics, car sharing and rental, roadside assistance and payment systems. It already collects 14.6bn data points in near-real-time every day from 10.7m connected vehicles, analysing 66 million journeys across a network of 50m vehicles.
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Wejo expects its connected vehicle network to expand significantly with nearly half of all vehicles globally expected to be connected vehicles by the end of this decade. Unlike collectors of legacy vehicle data, which aggregate historical batch data, Wejo provides the capability to source live data directly from integrated vehicle sensors across multiple major OEM manufacturers and Tier 1 auto part suppliers, allowing for near-real-time collection and analysis.
The manufacturer-agnostic cloud platform aggregates and normalizes data, creating standardized outputs across vehicles. It currently works with 17 OEM and Tier 1 companies with 274 customer agreements., The company has collected 9.1+ trillion data points collected to date, or 5 petabytes of information. This covers 44.4 billion journeys and 354 billion miles.
By 2030, Wejo estimates the Connected Vehicle Data Market will be worth $500bn with over 600 million connected vehicles worldwide.
“The connected vehicle is becoming an increasingly indispensable piece of technology, ever-present and ever-useful in our daily lives, and our innovative platform revolutionizes the way data is collected by plugging directly into the source, which creates unprecedented in-journey insight,” said Richard Blarlow, founder of Wejo. “This transaction will accelerate our growth plans through expansion across geographies and our addressable markets, which are significant. We are excited to have found a partner in Virtuoso who understands the potential of our business as we take this step forward in an important and burgeoning market.”
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