Local Motion provides a combined hardware and software fleet-management system: a small telematics box that connects to a vehicle’s onboard computer to enable door unlocking and usage tracking, feeding a SaaS dashboard and mobile app. The platform automates bookings and helps employees find and access the nearest available vehicle, enabling shared pools rather than individually assigned cars. Local Motion says customers typically reduce fleet usage by about 30 percent and estimates many fleets only use 40 percent of vehicles while another 20 percent may be broken without operators realizing it. Existing customers named in the articles include Google, the City of Sacramento, and the Downtown Project. The company plans to aggressively expand into enterprise and government markets to capture a larger share of the roughly 10 million fleet vehicles on the road. Local Motion was founded by John Stanfield and Clement Gires. Local Motion manufactures a module that can be installed in vehicles to replace keys, enable smartphone reservation, badge access, and collect GPS, accelerometer, and vehicle health data. The system lets users find and hold vehicles from a phone and uses on-vehicle lights and badge swipes for access. The company has deployed its technology at Google’s Mountain View campus (150 electric vehicles and 2,000 bicycles) and is targeting universities such as Standard (400 small electric vehicles and 1,500 cars) and large local corporations. Local Motion analyzes trip and usage data to advise customers where to distribute vehicles, which vehicle types to have, and how many, aiming to reduce costs. The founders graduated from and were the first company invested in by the Lemnos Labs hardware incubator. After raising a $1 million seed round, Local Motion moved to its own workspace in Burlingame and plans to expand product distribution, pursue 10 large local customers with more than 50 cars each, and ultimately seek installation at the manufacturing stage.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Aug 2013