Backed by Sherpa Capital, Nyca Partners, and BMW i Ventures, Zendrive leverages mobile data to provide actionable insights that improve road safety
Zendrive, the mobile technology that makes roads safer through data and analytics, today announced it has raised a $13.5 million Series A round 
led by Series A round led by Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Capital with participation from Nyca Partners, Thomvest Ventures (Peter J. Thomson), and existing investors First Round Capital, BMW i Ventures, Fontinalis Partners (Bill Ford), and Tad Montross. The funding will drive the company’s focus on safety innovation as the world rapidly moves toward the future of transportation.
“The transportation and logistics sectors in India are undergoing rapid growth and modernization. At the same time, road safety is becoming an increasing focus for regulators and communities (240,000 fatalities on the road in 2013).” Said Pankaj Risbood, Co-Founder and VP ENG of Zendrive, “Zendrive technology, by virtue of working on any smartphone, fits in very well with the requirements for a solution that is cheap, does not require hardware and can be rapidly deployed nationwide.”
Through its product suite, Zendrive’s SDK technology taps mobile sensors to measure driver safety through actions like acceleration, braking, swerving, and phone use, among many others. Zendrive, founded by Google and Facebook veterans, is utilizing powerful artificial intelligence algorithms and hundreds of billions of data points to analyze sensor data and return actionable insights for fleets and drivers. Because it’s software-based, managing and scaling within any number of vehicles is simple and affordable, allowing for more flexibility than a hardware solution.
“Zendrive represents the natural evolution of safety for the next wave of transportation innovation,” said Shervin Pishevar, co-founder of Sherpa Capital. “Stacked with mobile and data experts from Google and Facebook, this team has introduced the first significant driver and passenger safety innovation since airbags.”
Pankaj adds, “Zendrive engineering team in India is building state of the art machine learning models to monitor driving behaviors and employing game mechanics to coach drivers to become safer. We are already working with hundreds of billions of sensor data points and growing very rapidly to extract actionable insights for making roads safer.”
