Car fleet manager Ridecell raises $60 million backing
Ridecell has secured another $60 million in funding, bringing its total venture capital backing to $75 million, in a sign of investors’ confidence in the promise of self-driving technologies.
The San Francisco startup provides cloud software that manages car fleets, monitoring and automating everything from cleaning to maintenance — difficult tasks to track for dozens, hundreds or thousands of cars.
As car-sharing, ridehailing, on-demand delivery and autonomous cars continue to emerge as strong trends, Ridecell CEO Aarjav Trivedi predicts that four-fifths of vehicle miles traveled by 2030 will be in shared fleets rather than personally owned cars that are used just 5 percent of the time and sit idle most of the day.
“Cars today are not designed for high utilization,” Trivedi said. “Our prime directive is how to get cars utilized more and to manage them at scale.”
That’s where the company’s data and operational intelligence come into play. For instance, as it oversees car-sharing (hourly car rentals from free-floating locations) of electric vehicles, its software can decide that a vehicle with 60 percent charge can’t be rented to someone traveling to Tahoe but would be appropriate for someone shopping at Ikea or crossing the Bay Bridge.
The company employs 120. Clients include AAA’s Gig Car Share, which operates 500 cars in the East Bay and San Francisco and soon will add 250 electric cars in Sacramento, and BMW, which just expanded its ridehailing pilot in Seattle.
Last year Ridecell bought Santa Clara’s Auro Robotics, which makes self-driving shuttles, for an undisclosed price. It recently acquired a California DMV permit to test autonomous cars on public roads.
Ridecell was also one of a dozen companies that applied for a permit to deploy electric scooters in San Francisco. Its application, though not successful, had some novel features, such as a system for having riders take a selfie to show they were wearing the required helmet. Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid