Automile, a fleet logistics and management startup, has closed a $7.5 million Series A round led by SaaStr with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Niklas Zennstrom, Dawn Capital and Point Nine Capital.
Automile provides customers with a box to install under the vehicle’s dashboard to track mileage, trips and provide route tracking. Automile ships its tracking device to customers for free. Customers pay anywhere from $5.90 per vehicle per month to $19 per vehicle per month for the service once they start to use it.
The most expensive plan gets you mileage logs, trip statistics, expense management tools, real-time location tracking, accident alerts, risk reduction tools and predictive maintenance. Automile currently has 6,000 customers, including Samsung and Nestlé. But a lot of its customers are in the businesses of plumbing, cleaning, oil, farming and concrete.
“Everything that moves around in the market around our cities is what we do,” Automile CEO Jens Nylander told me.
The logistics business for enterprise (think repair services, construction and agriculture) is one of the industries that technology has yet to really dive into. It turns out that most commercial vehicles (about 80 percent) in the U.S. don’t have fleet management tools at all, according to Berg Insight.
With the exception of Fleetmatics, which Verizon (owner of TC via acquisition of AOL) bought back in August to expand its fleet management offerings, Nylander said that few startups are focused on innovating in the corporate logistics arena. What makes Automile different from Fleetmatics, Nylander said, is that its customers can easily install the device themselves, instead of having to wait for a professional to come out and install it for them.
Automile anticipates a year-end revenue of $3 million, up from $800,000 last year. With the new funding, Automile plans to more aggressively expand into Europe and build out its engineering team in Palo Alto.
