Lytx Name Change Reflects New Direction for San Diego’s DriveCam

Trucking, Traffic Safety, Highway, Telematics

San Diego-based DriveCam, which is 15 years old and has more than 240 employees, is heading in a new direction.

The company says it is changing its name to Lytx—as in analytics—in anticipation of a new business initiative to broaden and diversify its core business, which uses dashboard video cameras and telematics technologies to analyze driver behavior, identify risks, and provide feedback so fleet operators can reduce accidents, save lives, and hold down insurance costs. DriveCam will continue as the flagship business under the Lytx umbrella as the company rolls out some new lines of business.

Spokeswoman Julie Cunningham isn’t ready to talk about the company’s new initiatives. But as part of the name change, Lytx is emphasizing the expertise it has accrued in collecting and analyzing sensor data as part of its subscription-based software as a service.

“You may know us as DriveCam, but we’re about more than devices,” the company says on its website, and an accompanying video feels like it was produced around the use of such keyword terms as “compliance,” “safety,” and “optimize.”

PrintSo it’s conceivable that Lytx is laying plans to provide a similar sort of data monitoring with analytics feedback in such areas as healthcare or food safety. Think in terms of a nurse’s station in a cardiac care unit, where analytics and other prompts could be used to reduce caregiver errors.

The name change also follows a series of substantial equity funding deals for the profitable company.

Volvo made an undisclosed strategic investment earlier this year as DriveCam expanded its business into Europe and other foreign locales. In 2011, the company raised $85 million from the New York private equity firm Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe to acquire RAIR, a Wisconsin business that helps fleet operators manage a host of regulatory requirements for their vehicles and drivers.

RAIR also will continue as part of the new Lytx brand. While DriveCam claims to be the market leader (rivals SmartDrive Systems and Verizon Networkfleet also are based in San Diego) Cunningham says the DriveCam business has just 5 percent of a very large global market in terms of penetration, “which means we have a long way to go.”

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.