Wejo is British connected vehicle data start-up founded by entrepreneur Richard Barlow and is headquartered in

Greater Manchester Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county and combined authority, combined authority area in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million; comprising ten metropolitan boroughs: City of Manchester, Manchester, City of Salford, Salford ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. Wejo collects in near-real-time 14.6 billion data points and analyzes 66 million journeys across a network of 10.7 million live vehicles from a supply base of over 50 million connected vehicles. The Company offers a trading platform for connected car data and analytics. Wejo serves customers worldwide and was founded in 2013. The company, which is backed by General Motors, has recently gone through SPAC merger. This merger is set to raise $330m for Wejo including $230m from special purpose acquisition company Virtuoso and another $125m referred to as

Private Investment in Public Equity A private investment in public equity, often called a PIPE deal, involves the selling of publicly traded common shares or some form of preferred stock or convertible security to private investors. It is an allocation of shares in a public company n ...

(PIPE).

History

Wejo was founded in 2013 above a Greek Restauant in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

. Wejo, stands for "we journey," and at start-up it raised $157 million according to PitchBook from such investors as General Motors, which acquired a significant stake in 2019, German auto supplier Hella, DIP Capital and the British government. In November 2019, Wejo opened a second UK office in the centre of

's technology and enterprise zone. Wejo has participated in 3 rounds of funding since it was founded and has raised $120.2M in capital. Based on current valuations, it is classed as one of the UK’s prospective billion dollar-valued firms.

Partnerships

In June 2021 it was announced that Wejo would partner with Waycare to deliver a joint offering to 20 locations across the United States, with Wejo’s data supplementing Waycare’s existing data sources, providing traffic managers with a comprehensive understanding of conditions and the ability to not only detect and predict incidents, but also respond faster and more effectively based on real-world, near real-time data in a single platform from which they can all collaborate. On 29 June 2021, it was announced that

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and Japanese insurance giant

Sompo , formerly NKSJ Holdings and , is a Japanese insurance company. It is the second-largest property insurance company in Japan only behind Tokio Marine, with market share of 19.3% in 2007. The “Sompo” in the company's name means in Japanese, t ...

had joined Palantir in partnering with Wejo.

Technology

Wejo streams high volumes of anonymized vehicle data direct from the automotive manufacturer in real-time, before cleansing, normalizing, and processing it. It also standardizes the data across data sources to ensure consistency. The data is delivered from the vehicle source to the end-user customer within 32 seconds. Wejo has the largest number of accessible connected vehicles on its platform, with 42 million in 2019. To date, Wejo has curated over 140 billion miles of data.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Companies established in 2013 Companies based in Manchester