Motorq Closes $7 Million Series A Funding Round

Motorq, the connected car API company, has closed a $7 million Series A round of funding, the company announced on Thursday. 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 for fleet owners, with datapoints including vehicle location, charge/fuel use, driver behavior, safety warnings, maintenance alerts, certain remote commands, and other important information.

“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, cofounder 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.”

In November, Motorq integrated its cloud-based platform with General Motors’ OnStar Pre-Delivery data service to allow fleets to identify and track the location of Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles throughout their logistics lifecycles.

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 APIs and other tools. 

Rajagopalan says Motorq is initially focused on deploying the platform into the business fleet and dealer markets. Long term, Rajagopalan 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.

Motorq has relationships with seven of the top 10 global auto manufacturers covering 21 brands, with the ability to connect to and provision information from more than 32 million vehicles. 

“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.”