Veniam that delivers the Internet of Moving Things, announced a $22 million Series B round.
The funding is being led by Verizon Ventures with new investors Cisco Investments, Orange Digital Ventures, and Yamaha Motor Ventures joining the round. Existing investors True Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Cane Investments also participating. To date, Veniam has raised $27 million.
Veniam’s disruptive solutions for connected transportation and smart city applications address the growing challenges of rapid urbanisation by deploying a new kind of wireless Internet infrastructure that alleviates the digital divide, generates valuable data and improves city life. The funding will enable Veniam to expand its full-stack platform and deliver managed services over networks of connected vehicles to be deployed in urban fleets, ports, airports, factories and other transportation ecosystems around the world, including New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and London.
Veniam will also grow its teams in Silicon Valley, Porto (Portugal) and Singapore to continue developing its innovative hardware, software and cloud components, while delivering city-scale mesh networks of vehicles that expand wireless coverage and act as mobile sensors for a wide range of applications.
Key use cases include fully managed mobile Wi-Fi hotspots with advertising, onboard diagnostics and video, smart city applications and real-time monitoring and control of mobile assets in industrial spaces. Building on the success of the world’s largest network of connected vehicles, currently operating in Porto, Portugal with 300,000 individual Wi-Fi users, Veniam aims to improve quality of life in cities by providing unprecedented real-time connectivity and urban data for consumers, commercial fleets and city decision makers.
“Citywide mesh networks of connected vehicles and other moving things are a radically new concept and we are excited to support Veniam in enabling the smart cities of the future,” said Ed Ruth, manager at Verizon Ventures. “Veniam’s hardware enables uninterrupted 4G and 5G connectivity, and their cloud-based services empower both private enterprises and city services to act upon valuable security, safety and operational efficiency data to improve the quality of life for all citizens.”
Veniam’s technology products and platforms combine DSRC connected vehicle technology, 4G, Wi-Fi, and mesh networking to provide seamless handoffs between network infrastructure and vehicles, thereby enabling ubiquitous, reliable, and low cost connectivity, while accelerating next generation 5G heterogeneous networks. The company’s technology also provides cloud-managed solutions to improve fleet operations and solve urban problems.
“The convergence of urban mobility systems, IoT wireless technologies, geo-referenced data, and soon the autonomous vehicle, is completely disrupting the way we transport people and goods,” said João Barros, founder and CEO of Veniam. “Veniam is proud to lead this convergence by expanding wireless coverage and data services for people, vehicles and moving things, thereby generating new applications, revenue streams and business models for telecom operators and the Industry 4.0.”
Veniam’s managed services turn moving vehicles into active nodes of the Internet, thereby offering new ways to leverage commercial fleets and city infrastructure for better services and quality of life.
- Veniam enables public and private fleets to collect massive amounts of high definition data from their vehicles in a cost-effective manner.
- Veniam allows smart cities to collect urban data at a massive scale by turning vehicles into mobile sensors and transporting the data from fixed city sensors via the mobile mesh to the cloud.
- Veniam helps provide high quality Wi-Fi to fleet passengers. Mobile data usage is expected to increase dramatically – and cellular networks are going to be overburdened by this data usage. Veniam helps offload mobile data usage from congested areas through the innovative use of DSRC and delay-tolerant networking.
Veniam’s networking technology is uniquely positioned to become a platform of choice for connected vehicles, enabling them to deploy DSRC-based safety applications, run software updates over the air and deliver secure communications between each vehicle and any wireless device in its vicinity. With Veniam’s solutions, transportation operators will hold the key enabler for new modes of on-demand transportation and future mobility services, including autonomous vehicles.
Veniam was founded by technologists and visionaries João Barros, Professor at University of Porto, Portugal, Susana Sargento, Associate Professor at University of Aveiro, Portugal, Robin Chase, founder and former CEO of Zipcar, and Roy Russell, Zipcar founding CTO.
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