Connected vehicle firm wejo has turned to a Silicon Valley AI giant as it moves towards its goal of becoming a unicorn.
Chester-headquartered wejo was founded by Richard Barlow in 2014 and provides information to a variety of end-users including insurers, local authorities and breakdown recovery services by tracking millions of connected cars.
Its software tracks traffic and uses machine learning to improve traffic and safety management operations.
wejo will use Databricks’ unified data analytics platform to empower data-driven decisions throughout the lifecycle of data ingestion, engineering, data science and business analytics.
To date, wejo has curated over 140 billion miles of data and expects to have 17 million cars on its platform by the end of the year. It currently processes more than 15 billion data points every day.
David Wyatt, vice president and general manager EMEA at Databricks, said: “Delivering world-class mobility services, wejo has to overcome multiple challenges caused by the sheer volume and complexity of the data it receives.
“The data generated by connected vehicles has so much potential to make roads safer, reduce traffic congestion and enhance road users’ experiences.
“wejo is a true pioneer in the rapidly developing connected vehicle arena and we are proud to be helping them process data and deliver even richer data intelligence.”
wejo was named as the ‘Fastest Growing Company of the Year’ at GP Bullhound’s Northern Tech Awards earlier this year.
It recently opened a 10,000 sq ft state-of-the-art office covering two floors in Manchester’s Enterprise City as it moves towards an IPO.
It was announced in February that American automotive giant General Motors (GM) had taken a 35 per cent stake in wejo, valuing the company at $275m (£213m).
Steve Pimblett, chief information and data officer at wejo, said: “Vehicle data, and how it is captured, analysed and utilised for the benefits of drivers, is fundamental to the future success of our business.
“The volume of data we are receiving will continue to grow exponentially due to the expected rise in the number of connected vehicles on the road.
“Databricks’ platform enables us to accelerate data-driven innovation across our organisation.”