Today, we’re thrilled to announce Smartcar has raised a $10 million round of Series A financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This follows a $2 million round of seed financing from a16z, which brings our total financing raised to-date to $12 million. We are also excited to welcome Forest Baskett from NEA and William Krause from a16z to the Smartcar Board of Directors.
We founded Smartcar in 2015 after we became frustrated trying to build a mobile app that would communicate with vehicles (think “check odometer” or “unlock doors”). While many cars were already internet-connected, we couldn’t find a way to integrate with them. Cars didn’t have documented APIs and each car manufacturer had proprietary cloud infrastructure. Some companies worked around these issues by using aftermarket hardware (like OBD dongles), but these devices came with severe limitations and a prohibitive upfront cost.
Smartcar is a connected car platform that lets you read vehicle data and send commands to vehicles of any brand using HTTP requests in a single engineering effort. We take advantage of embedded telematics hardware already present in vehicles, maintain a suite of SDKs, and have comprehensive API docs to help you get started.
Our objective at Smartcar is simple: we want to make it easy and secure for developers to build apps that communicate with vehicles.
Over the past three years, we’ve already enabled many companies to build new experiences for their customers. From car sharing and fleet management services to smart parking and insurance, our partners are pioneering a world of truly connected automobility.
Smartcar is a lean team with a focused product; we chose to raise more financing as we began to see traction and excitement from early customers on our platform. As the team grows, we will build out our developer experience, iterate on our core platform, and support more vehicle brands.
While we’re very excited about what lies ahead, we wouldn’t be where we are today without the support of our first OEM partners (BMW and Hyundai), investors, team, and early adopters of the Smartcar platform. To everyone who’s helped us get this far — thank you. We still have a long way to go towards a future where millions of apps communicate seamlessly with all vehicles on the road. Today, we’re grateful to be one step closer to making this future a reality.
Cheers,
Sahas and Sanketh
Co-Founders, Smartcar
P.S.: We're hiring! 🚀
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