BENGALURU:

Zendrive Inc., a mobile technology company which aims to make roads safer through data and analytics, raised $13.5 million in Series A funding led by Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Capital with participation from Nyca Partners, Thomvest Ventures ( Peter J. Thomson) and existing investors First Round Capital, BMW i Ventures, Fontinalis Partners (Bill Ford) and Tad Montross. The company said the funding will help drive its focus on safety innovation. Launched in 2013, the San Francisco-based company that has offices in Bengaluru had raised $1.5 million in its earlier round, taking its total funding raised so far to $15 million. "The transportation and logistics sectors in India are undergoing rapid growth and modernization. At the same time, road safety is becoming an increasing focus for regulators and communities (240,000 fatalities on the road in 2013)," said Pankaj Risbood, co-founder and vice-president, data engineering, at Zendrive, in a statement. The technology taps mobile sensors to measure driver safety through actions like acceleration, braking, swerving, and phone use among other data to analyse and return actionable insight for fleets and drivers. India accounts for more than 200,000 deaths because of road accidents, according to the 2015 Global Road Safety Report by the World Health Organization. "Zendrive technology, by virtue of working on any smartphone, fits in very well with the requirements for a solution that is cheap, does not require hardware and can be rapidly deployed nationwide," said Risbood.