SoftBank joins GM, BMW and Toyota as investor in US-based AI developer Nauto

Autonomous driving is one of the key future technologies of the global automotive industry, and Softbank is the latest to bet big on it. The Japanese multinational and American venture capital firm Greylock Partners have led a Series B investment of $159 million (Rs 1,004 crore) in a Silicon Valley based software company, Nauto, which has strong focus on artificial intelligence for vehicles.    

Nauto is working on artificial intelligence-powered system and data platform that will help improve fleet safety and development of self-driving technology. Other investors in the company include BMW iVentures, General Motors Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures and insurance provider Allianz Group that were among the first investors betting on the technology.

"While building an increasingly intelligent telematics business, Nauto is also generating a highly valuable dataset for autonomous driving, at massive scale," said SoftBank Group chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son. "This data will help accelerate the development and adoption of safe, effective self-driving technology.”

Nauto is working on AI-powered data platform that aims to enhance driving safety and making fleets smarter. The platform’s hardware saves lives by preventing collisions, improving driver behaviour, and learning from diverse data shared across its network.

The funding will be help Nauto in its growth and deployment of its retrofit safety and networking system into more vehicles globally. Also it will support the expansion of its data platform in autonomous vehicle research and development across multiple automakers. 

Technology Framework

As more Nauto units get deployed and Nauto-enabled vehicles accumulate more miles, the Nauto network becomes more precise and gains greater understanding of human driving behavior that provides more valuable data and safety features. 

The resulting insights help improve fleet safety and operations, as well as save lives and reduce liability and expenses. Over time the Nauto data platform will inform the transition to and co-existence of human-driven and autonomous vehicles.

“At a time when traffic fatalities are climbing and distracted driving causes more than half of all crashes, we’re tackling that problem by putting Nauto’s safety features into more commercial fleet vehicles — from trucks and vans to buses and passenger cars — to warn drivers and coach them on how to stay focused. And, in pursuit of the profoundly transformational impact autonomous vehicle technology can have on business and society, we’ll now be able to rapidly gather billions of more miles of real driving experience and data required to get a precise understanding of how the best drivers behave behind the wheel,“ says Nauto founder and CEO Stefan Heck. 

“In the future, driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyse, and redistribute knowledge. By building a network of vehicles and drivers, Nauto is accelerating the transition from a human-driver dominant world to a safer, more efficient autonomous-driving era,” said Greylock partner and Nauto board member, Reid Hoffman. “Nauto is building a valuable automotive data platform that will not only make roads safer now, but also gain valuable insights about how humans operate cars for the future.”

With the announcement, Greylock’s Hoffman and SoftBank’s Shu Nyatta will take board seats at Nauto, joining existing members including Nauto’s Stefan Heck, automotive industry veteran Karen C. Francis (Ford, GM) and Bruce Leak of Playground Global.

How Nauto Works 

 
Nauto is an automotive data platform, powered by artificial intelligence and an after-market dual-camera device, which can be equipped in any vehicle or fleet with sophisticated safety and networking features. The Nauto 2 system also includes a new windshield mounted hardware design, updated deep learning and computer vision algorithms and smart cloud network informed by the accumulation of more than a million miles on urban streets and highways.

As Nauto learns from other drivers, the road and conditions around vehicles in the Nauto network, fleets equipped with Nauto can automatically capture and upload video of significant events and insights in real time to help fleet managers improve overall driver performance and enhance the safety and efficiency of an entire fleet.  Nauto’s scoring system, called VERA (Vision Enhanced Risk Assessment) includes a risk rating for the frequency and severity of distraction events (for example, a distraction event while stopped at a red light would not generate the same high risk score as a distraction event that occurred at  65 mph speed on a freeway).