San Diego’s SmartDrive Systems Raises $47M, Names New CEO

Here come the freeway metaphors. San Diego’s SmartDrive Systems, which provides Web-based services linked to dashboard video, says it has topped off its tank with $47 million in additional venture funding and named former Veoh CEO Steve Mitang as its new designated driver.

The company, founded in 2004, targets public and commercial motor vehicle fleets, using videos to coach drivers. SmartDrive says its driving safety and fuel programs can reduce collisions by as much as 80 percent, and improve fuel consumption up to 30 percent—which can pencil out to annual savings of as much as $12,000 per vehicle.

The company, which uses video clips of actual driving incidents in its tutorials, says it has compiled more than 44 million unsafe driving incidents.

SmartDrive’s existing investors, Oak Investment Partners and New Enterprise Associates, led the latest funding round, along with new investor Stanford University. The company says the capital infusion will be used to accelerate customer adoption, channel partnerships, and research and development.

“We firmly believe that SmartDrive will continue to out-distance the competition by offering a superior solution based on innovation,” Dave Vucina, SmartDrive board chairman, says in the statement. “With customers seeing material results within weeks of deployment, we see this as an enormous market opportunity.”

Before joining SmartDrive, Mitgang was CEO at Veoh, the Internet television company now part of Qlipso. He previously served as senior vice president of Yahoo’s advertising products, platforms, and services.

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.