Necture, an Austrian start-up that has built a platform for managing car fleets and charging infrastructure, has raised further funding that brings its Series A round to more than $7 million.
The start-up, previously known as Ubiq, has rebranded in conjunction with the fresh injection of capital.
The round was led by Smart Energy Innovationsfonds and Verbund X Ventures along with existing investors Speedinvest and smartworks innovation GmbH. The Series A round now totals €7 million ($7.6 million).
Necture’s platform is used by car sharing and rental fleets to manage their use as well as the transition to electric.
The SaaS platform provides predictive analysis to operators, giving them bird’s eye view of operations and charging status.
According to Necture, this results in greater uptime for fleets and reduced costs, ultimately meaning a smoother transition to electric.
Chief executive Christian Adelsberger said that Necture is working with car sharing fleets in 20 cities in Europe, North America and South America with 15,000 vehicles under management.
Now the start-up wants to expand to business fleets but that presents its own unique challenges.
“We’ve learned that what we do in a niche market of car sharing, the value we create there, we can translate that pretty much into the business fleet world,” Adelsberger said.
However unlike car sharing fleets, business fleets lag behind on connectivity, data and the transition to electric.
“One of the challenges that is blocking us from the technological side is the level of connectivity that’s currently available on the mass market. In the car sharing world, we’re used to dealing with vehicles that are fully connected,” Adelsberger said.
“In the business fleet world that’s not as established. Only a certain percentage. This kind of slows down our capability to leverage on further efficiency gains,” he added.
“This is definitely something that we’re working on right now with OEMs to get direct access to their core systems but also working on aftermarket technologies to connect those vehicles because that’s the ultimate enabler for us.”
Necture is kicking off one such relationship with a car maker currently but Adelsberger is mum on who it is.
Car makers are sitting on a treasure trove of data from their vehicles that can be monetized but, as Adelsberger said, they need to be more willing to work with third parties like Necture.
“Most of the vehicles by now and EVs are connected but that connectivity is behind a walled garden and it’s still fully owned by the car maker,” he said.
“For them it’s very to difficult to think of losing control. They know that they have gold in their hands in terms of the car data but they don’t know how to monetize it. So that’s a little bit of a deadlock situation that they’re in.”
Necture’s primary market is Europe but it has a growing presence in the Americas.
“South America is interesting because the barriers towards ownership of a car are very high from a financial point of view, so shared mobility is an attractive option for people living in cities.”
The Series A funding will be used to both expand the company’s offering into corporate fleets and grow its market footprints in both regions.
Adelsberger said it has a unique offering to do that.
“It’s not enough to just provide a socket for someone to charge. That doesn’t solve the problem of the fleet with a thousand vehicles, you actually need to manage the operations of which car should be first charging where and when, because it’s going to be utilized tomorrow at 9am in the morning.”
