KIRKLAND, Wash. – July 25, 2011 – INRIX®, a leading international provider of traffic information and connected driving services, announced a commitment of $37 million in Series D round funding led by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers’ (KPCB) Green Growth Fund and August Capital. The investment will be used to fuel acquisition efforts, continued global expansion and R&D efforts focused on the company’s growing in-car services and mobile applications businesses. Currently more than 100 Million People in more than 22 Countries use INRIX-powered traffic services.
“With over 150 industry-leading customers across 8 different distribution channels, a profitable business, and nearly 90 percent compound annual revenue growth over the past 3 years, INRIX did not need to raise capital,” said Bryan Mistele, president and CEO of INRIX. “However, given new market opportunities including the rapid adoption of our premium traffic services, increasing demand from automakers for global solutions and the explosion of LBS on mobile devices, we’re accelerating several investments designed to firmly cement our global leadership position.”
In the last year alone, INRIX amassed 40 new industry partners and customers, was awarded seven new patents, tripled the size of its crowd-sourced Smart Driver Network and extended its reach internationally to six new countries. With 150 industry-leading companies and more than 100 million people using INRIX’s traffic information today, the company is improving mobility worldwide by helping drivers save time, use less fuel, and reduce their environmental impact.
“Traffic congestion costs the U.S. economy upwards of $155 billion dollars annually. Last year alone, US drivers wasted 3.9 billion gallons of fuel sitting idle in traffic, and the US is a small part of a much larger and growing global traffic problem,” commented Michael Linse, partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. “We believe that INRIX is uniquely positioned to help improve the efficiency of our cars in ways that reduce fuel consumption and improve sustainability for all.”
Highlights from INRIX’s recent momentum include:
– Automotive: Two new automakers selected INRIX in the first half of 2011 to provide real-time traffic information and traffic-influenced routing for their connected navigation systems. Audi and Toyota are using INRIX traffic services in their vehicles starting with the new Audi A6 in Europe and Toyota Entune-equipped Prius V and Camry in North America. INRIX currently powers Ford SYNC traffic and navigation services.
– Mobile: Debuting this week on BlackBerry and Windows Phone, nearly 2 million drivers use the INRIX Traffic app on iPhone and Android to save time, money and fuel on their daily commutes, Rated by comScore as one of the Top 10 most used navigation apps, INRIX also has shipped custom private label apps for Ford (SYNC Destinations), NAVIGON (traffic4all) and teamed with Pioneer to establish INRIX Traffic as one of the first apps available on their breakthrough AppRadio device.
– Public Sector: INRIX has signed more than 20 new agreements over the past year with U.S. and European regional transportation agencies to use INRIX traffic information to help manage their road networks and provide travel information to the public, improve long-range planning and measure system performance. In a time of austerity measures and ever-tightening transportation budgets, INRIX is leading the way helping agencies in a dozen North American and European countries – including 47 U.S. states — transition toward solutions that help them achieve their goals for a fraction of the cost it takes to expand, operate and maintain road sensor networks.
The INRIX Difference
INRIX is uniquely positioned to benefit from the convergence of automotive, mobile and public sector efforts to leverage the latest smart devices, data analytics and connectivity technologies for improving how the world’s one billion drivers travel from place to place. In 2006, the company pioneered the idea of large scale “crowd-sourcing” of traffic information from actual vehicles on the road by partnering with commercial fleets – taxi cabs, service delivery vans and long haul trucks – to have them provide continuous real-time speed and location reports every minute. Today, INRIX operates the largest traffic network in the world combining crowd-sourced data from commercial fleets, consumer vehicles and mobile devices, journalistic incident data and traditional road sensor data with a unique understanding of the impact of local events – school schedules, concerts, sporting events – to deliver highly accurate real-time, predictive and historical traffic information.
About Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers
Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in over 500 ventures, including AOL, Amazon, Citrix, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Sun, Symantec, Verisign and Zynga. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 250,000 people. More than 150 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone public. Many other ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions.
About August Capital
August Capital was founded in 1995 to invest in companies differentiated by technical innovation and entrepreneurial excellence. To date, the August Capital funds total $2.0 billion. August Capital’s partners have more than a century of combined venture experience and together have invested in more than 80 companies across the technology spectrum. These companies represent an aggregate market capitalization of well over $250 billion and generate in excess of $75 billion in annual revenue. The partners at August Capital were the earliest investors in a number of ground breaking technology companies including Microsoft, Intuit, Seagate, Silicon Image, Sun Microsystems, Skype, Compaq, Symantec, Sybase, Atheros, Postini, Cobalt, shopping.com, PayCycle, Grand Junction and many more. August Capital is located in Menlo Park, California. For more information, please visit: www.augustcap.com.
