KeepTruckin raises $190 million to invest in AI products, double R&D team to 700 –

KeepTruckin, a hardware and software developer that helps trucking fleets manage vehicle, cargo and driver safety, has just raised $190 million in a Series E funding round, which puts the company’s valuation at over $2 billion, according to CEO Shoaib Makani. KeepTruckin intends to invest its new capital back into its AI-powered products like its GPS tracking, ELD compliance and dispatch and workflow, but it’s specifically interested in improving its smart dashcam, which instantly detects unsafe driving behaviors like cell phone distraction and close following and alerts the drivers in real time, according to Makani. “We have developed in-house IPs to solve this problem at different environmental conditions such as low-light, extreme weather, occluded subject and distortions.” This kind of accuracy requires billions of ground truth data points that are trained and tested on KeepTruckin’s in-house machine learning platform, a process that is very resource-intensive. The platform includes smart annotation capabilities to automatically label the different data points so the neural network can play with millions of potential situations, achieving similar performance to the edge device that’s in the field with real-world environmental conditions, according to Makani. Since the pandemic, the company said it experienced 70% annualized growth, in large part due to expansion into new markets like construction, oil and gas, food and beverage, field services, moving and storage and agriculture.