A local mobile sensing company raised half a billion dollars from SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund on Wednesday. This is the latest investment made by the Japanese tech giant in a list of around 20 Boston-area deals within the last two decades.
The beneficiary is Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), a Kendall Square-based company with 70 employees that started from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. The company announced that it received an investment of $500 million, one of the biggest funding rounds of the year for a Massachusetts company and likely the biggest cash grab for a local tech venture this year.
Thanks to artificial intelligence and behavioral science, CMT gathers driving performance data from drivers' smartphones to provide accurate insurance pricing, among other things. CMT’s partners include insurers such as State Farm and Liberty Mutual.
Also, the company is among the developers of Boston’s Safest Driver iPhone app, which provides users with feedback on their driving habits based upon their speed, acceleration, braking, cornering and phone distraction.
The SoftBank investment will accelerate the adoption of CMT’s DriveWell platform, which is used by insurers, fleets, wireless carriers to measure driving risk and improve driver safety. It will also fuel CMT’s growth in automated crash and claims management, video analytics and safety for emerging vehicle and mobility systems.
SoftBank's massive $100 billion Vision Fund is led by Tokyo-based Masayoshi Son and nine other managing partners who are mostly from the world of banking. Almost half of the fund comes from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth, which has put in $45 billion.
Since 2016, the fund has shaken up Silicon Valley by buying big stakes in fast-growing technology companies. Currently, SoftBank is Uber’s largest shareholder and poured billions in WeWork, NVidia and Flipkart (and millions in Slack).
On a local level, SoftBank is mostly known for its acquisition of Boston Dynamics from Google owner Alphabet in June 2017. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; Alphabet acquired the Waltham-based robotics company in 2013 and put it up for sale in 2016, after concluding that Boston Dynamics wasn’t likely "to produce a marketable product in the next few years."
In a statement, Hari Balakrishnan, CMT’s Chairman and CTO, said: "Over the past few years, the DriveWell platform has helped make roads safer by making drivers better in a world where crashes are rising due to factors like distracted driving."
Balakrishnan founded CMT with Bill Powers (CEO) and Sam Madden (Chief Scientist) in 2010. In 2012, CMT deployed its first product—a service to efficiently gather and process sensory data from phones for auto insurance. Two years later, CMT’s DriveWell Tag was one of the first fully wireless “Internet of Things” devices to measure vehicle dynamics for actuarial scoring and for real-time impact alerts.
