KeepTruckin has recently raised $190 million in a Series E funding round, making its valuation at $2 billion. The company develops hardware and software that helps manage cargo vehicles and ensure driver safety.
Existing investors along with a few new firms like G2 Associates, participated in the funding round. According to the company’s CEO Shoaib Makani, KeepTruckin plans to invest this money to improve its AI-powered smart dashcam, which detects unsafe driving activities like mobile distraction and alerts the driver. Along with the dashcam, the company also intends to enhance its range of AI products like GPS tracking and ELD compliance.
Shoaib Makani said, “KeepTruckin’s specialty is that we can build complex models and make it run on the edge with low-power, low-memory, and low-bandwidth constraints.” He further added that they had developed in-house IPs to resolve problems at various environmental conditions like extreme weather, occluded subject, low light, and distortions.
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Usher Transport, one of KeepTruckin’s clients, stated that they recorded an annual reduction of 32% in accidents after using the safety products offered by KeepTruckin, such as the Smart Dashcam.
The enterprise’s self-developed machine learning platform trains and tests billions of ground truth data points, which is a very resource-intensive process to deliver high accuracy outcomes.
According to Makani, the machine learning platform includes smart annotation capabilities to automatically label the different data points so the neural network can simulate innumerable potential situations, achieving similar performance to the edge device in the field with real-world environmental conditions.
Since the pandemic, KeepTruckin said it experienced 70% annual growth, mainly because of its expansion into new markets like food and beverage, field services, construction, oil and gas, and agriculture. The company expects the demand to rise and aims to use the recently acquired funds to recruit more talent and expand its R&D team to 700 employees globally.
