TechCrunch
Drivewyze Raises $7.5M From Emergence, iNovia To Streamline Commercial Trucking
Drivewyze, which helps commercial trucking companies save time by bypassing weigh stations through a mobile app, just raised $7.5 million in a round led by Emergence Capital Partners and iNovia Capital.
They’ll use the capital for a sales and marketing expansion of their bypass service that should bring their offering nationwide by next year. It works through a mobile app that alerts a subscribing trucker when they are about two miles away from an inspection site. It’s currently available in 16 states, but the company is hoping to get to full national coverage in 2014.
The company is a spinout from Intelligent Imaging Systems, a Canadian road technology company that has been around for a decade. They launched Drivewyze as a standalone division last year and starting signing up truck fleets with good historical safety scores. They built a commercial mobile radio service that allows their platform to communicate with inspection sites.
When truckers are about one mile from a Drivewyze-enabled inspection site, the app will let the driver know whether to bypass it or report in for an inspection depending on what the local law enforcement agency says they should do.
Their business model is to charge $7.99 per month for a single state and $12.99 for a multi-state plan.
Emergence Capital, which is an enterprise-focused fund that has backed Salesforce, Yammer and Box, has been looking for software-as-a-service bets that cater to very specific verticals including transportation and health. They have about $575 million under management.
Yahoo Acquires Image Recognition Startup IQ Engines To Improve Flickr Photo Organization & Search
Oh, so you thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree was over? Not even close. A Yahoo spokesperson has confirmed that the revitalized web giant has snapped up yet another company — this time it’s a image recognition startup called IQ Engines.
Yahoo has declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but the IQ Engines team confirmed in a statement on their website that they have been tapped to join the Flickr team where they will work on “improving photo organization and search for the community.”
IQ Engines first made a splash back in 2010 when it snapped up $1 million in funding for crafting an API that would allow its customers (think online retailers and app developers) to provide a visual search engine of sorts that could automatically categorize images on the fly. It later appeared at that year’s DEMO Conference, where our own Alexia Tsotsis picked it out as one of the show’s most impressive startups.
Eventually, the startup would come to maintain two APIs. The first was called SmartCamera, and it was geared mostly toward retailers who wanted users to interact with products and brand logos by scanning them with their smartphone cameras. The other API, SmartAlbum, allows for photo analysis and facial recognition for online photo albums and mobile apps — if I were a betting man, I’d wager this is the bit Yahoo is really after.
Those APIs were adopted by a host of high-profile customers including retailers Best Buy, Old Navy, and Tesco, though the APIs they had access to will be shut down in 30 days. More recently though, IQ Engines locked up a $3.8 million Series B from Third Point Ventures and Motorola Solutions’ venture arm (not to be confused with the totally separate mobile division that Google now owns).
So what’s the IQ Engines team going to do now? While IQ Engines’ main bread and butter was offering image recognition APIs, it was also working on a mobile photo album application called Glow that organizes the images on your smartphone into categories based on automatically generated tags — as seen in this demo video (below) released back in July the app is not only smart enough to tag photos based on location, but also their contents. A quick bit of tapping meant users would be able to view all their sunset photos, or all the photos have prominently feature faces in them. Given the team’s statement it wouldn’t be a shock to see them try to bring some of this contextual intelligence to Flickr as a whole, though the Flickr mobile app seems like a more logical starting point.
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