Telefónica Ventures starts investing in Spain joined by La Caixa

MADRID | Telefónica Ventures and Caixa Capital TIC, a specialised digital technology fund of La Caixa, announced Tuesday its first investment. The joint platform will inject €3 million in addFleet, a company specialised in intelligent systems for transportation. The investment in addFleet is the first by Telefónica Ventures in Spain after having completed similar operations in other international technology companies such as Quantenna, Joyent and Boku.

Telefónica and La Caixa said the plan is to promote the commercialisation of the company’s products worldwide. addFleet is a recently-created company headed by Bartolomé Olivares and Daniel Cabrera, and accelerated by the Inspirit group, investors explained in a press release. It has developed a new mobility system based on cloud computing that uses mobile devices to connect vehicles to taxi dispatch centres and users with M2M technology.

 “Taxi dispatch centres are currently managed using analogue radio systems or servers installed at the dispatch centres that connect the terminals on-board each vehicle. The main disadvantage of these systems,” addFleet noted, “is that they require a large investment and do not allow direct communication between the dispatcher, the vehicle and the user.

“addFleet’s technology offers (…) a significant reduction in costs because the service does not require an initial investment in servers since the solution is based on cloud computing and the technology does not require installation and is self-configuring.”

Drivers simply download the application to a smartphone, which will then allow them to connect to the dispatch centre via M2M technology and determine the location of the customers closest to their current location.

The company was created in Barcelona in January 2012 and is currently running a pilot test of the platform with 200 vehicles in several countries in Europe and Latin America. The company has also signed an agreement with Telefónica to include its product in its worldwide portfolio of M2M products.