Startup Spotlight #40 Drive Buddy

May 2, 2020

Traffic accidents cause death and loss of property in many countries. Traffic accidents can happen for many reasons. However, the vast majority are due to driver errors. This shows that driver habits have great importance for safe driving. Changing and following these habits can prevent many traffic accidents. Thus, possible loss of life and property is prevented. Imagine you have a vehicle fleet of hundreds of vehicles. In this case, the driving habits of your drivers have special importance for you. Drive Buddy provides a solution to those problems.

What is your first name?

Emre Yigit

Welcome, Emre Yigit! What is your surname?

Alparslan

What is the name of your startup?

Drive Buddy

What is the website address of Drive Buddy?

https://drivebuddyapp.com

Where is your startup based?

Turkey

What are your targeted verticals for your startup?

Machine Learning / AIMobility / LogisticsFintech

Tell us what your startup does.

Drive Buddy is a mobile telematics platform that analyzes the driver's driving behaviors and detects car accidents using sensors on smartphones. Drive Buddy offers hardware-free telematics solutions to fleet owners, including logistics and insurers, to help them to spot drivers having dangerous driving habits in their fleets.

Tell us about your team.

Drive Buddy established in 2017 and developed by developers who have a Computer Science degree. The team has experience in big companies including Udemy, Google.

When and why did you found your startup?

We have been wondering about our loved ones while they are traveling because of high accident rates and we knew that thousands of people are dying in traffic accidents. When we discover that 95% of accidents are happening because of driver habits, we have started to develop our mobile-based driving behavior solution.

What are your key and unique features?

What makes Drive Buddy unique is being a hardware-free, mobile-base solution. Drive Buddy integration can be done in 30 minutes and fleet owners can start tracking their thousands of drivers right away. With the help of this Drive Buddy can collect 80 times faster data and lower fleets accidents risk up to 40% without any hardware and operational costs.Another significant unique feature that Drive Buddy has is that distracted driving scoring. Since Drive Buddy SDK is attached to the companies' mobile application and tracking drivers over their smartphone, it can analyze how much the driver is interacting with the phone while driving. While current statistics are showing that distracted driving is more dangerous than alcoholic driving this is one of the most important and unique features that other companies cannot offer.

What is your growth like?

We are in the pre-revenue stage at the moment, with ongoing POCs in different countries.Tell us about the numbers that matter to you.We have tracked more than 1M+ kilometers.

What are your plans for next year and next 5 years?

The main goal of the Drive Buddy team is developing self-driving car AI algorithms by using know-how about unique driving patterns of each individual in the system. With the help of our solution letting us reach millions of drivers in minutes, we are planning to focus on this direction.

Did you receive any investments?

Drive Buddy is supported by the European Union H2020 grants and other government organizations in Turkey and the UK.

Tell us 3 startups that excite you, and why?

All of our competitors are unique from the perspective they develop their products. However, Root Insurance is a unique startup that gets into the business in the most disruptive way. They are offering mobile driving analyzes and dynamic policy solutions from scratch.

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