Sweden’s Volvo Makes Strategic Investment as DriveCam Goes Global

Trucking, Traffic Safety, Highway, Telematics

Volvo Group Venture Capital has made a strategic investment in San Diego-based DriveCam, which marked its fourth year of profitable operations in 2012 with more than $100 million in orders. The amount of Volvo’s investment was not disclosed in the statement today.

Volvo Group Venture Capital is part of the Volvo Group, based in Göteborg, Sweden. The company is a leading manufacturer of trucks, buses, construction equipment, and marine and industrial engines. The Volvo Group also noted its history of vehicle safety, saying its analysis of truck accidents has been one of the important bases for design and safety-related improvements at the company.

DriveCam, founded in 1998, uses dashboard video and telematics technologies to provide behavior-based risk mitigation—helping fleet operators, insurance companies and customers improve the way people drive. The company helps prevent collisions and reduces fuel costs by combining data and video analytics with driver coaching and real-time data feedback.

The transaction would have no material effect on the Volvo Group’s global earnings. Volvo Group Venture Capital says it will take a minority stake in DriveCam. Other DriveCam investors include San Diego’s JMI Equity, the private equity firm Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, Menlo Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Insight Venture Partners, and Integral Capital Partners.

In a statement yesterday, DriveCam said it grew its subscription base by 50 percent and doubled the number of orders in 2012, compared with 2011. DriveCam said it had increased its subscription base through global expansion, new strategic partnerships, and continued growth within existing customer fleets.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.