COMPREDICT, a startup specializing in AI-enabled software solutions for predictive maintenance, vehicle health and usage monitoring, has raised a Series A Round of €5.5 million led by Vektor Partners, a mobility-focused VC firm, and BlackBerry Limited.

COMPREDICT’s innovative virtual sensors enable vehicle operators and manufacturers (OEMs) to gain a deeper insight into how their vehicles’ safety-critical components are used and manage the lifespan of brakes, tires, batteries or other critical components to identify issues early and cut down on expensive warranty and maintenance costs. Transforming unscheduled or unnecessary outages into scheduled events creates significant economic value and helps operators increase vehicle uptime and utilization. COMPREDICT’s unique approach combines mechatronic and durability domain expertise with data science and allows value-added insights on both wearable and non-wearable vehicle components.

With multiple OEM engagements for pre-production and production vehicles and an intuitive cloud-based analytics dashboard that provides a holistic view of a vehicle’s health across more than a dozen wearable components such as brakes and tires, as well as non-wearable components like the suspension and chassis, COMPREDICT is well placed to tap into the large and growing predictive maintenance market. Industry analysts expect the market to grow from $3.8 billion in 2020, to more than $21.7 billion by 2028 with Deloitte estimating that predictive analytics could reduce a mass-market OEM’s warranty expense by 15-20%, representing hundreds of millions of dollars of potential savings.

In addition, COMPREDICT’s technology has the potential to help vehicle makers unlock new future revenue streams. Recently some OEMs have publicly stated their aspirations to generate as much as $20 billion from connected vehicle services this decade with technologies like COMPREDICT’s playing a key role in helping vehicle makers meet these targets. As transportation platforms get ever more connected, applications that reliably improve uptime will lead to cost savings beyond the vehicle.

Dr. Muriel Desaeger, Technical Head, Technology Planning & Incubation at Toyota Motor Europe comments: "COMPREDICT has very interesting skills in an emerging field. Its expertise in both Big Data and Virtual Sensors is for us an enabler when considering the development of future vehicles."

As a strategic investor BlackBerry will support COMPREDICT’s growth and product portfolio through its BlackBerry IVY Innovation Fund. BlackBerry is a global leader in vehicle software, with the company’s QNX® technology used by 24 of the top 25 EV OEMs and embedded in more than 215 million vehicles worldwide. Its innovative BlackBerry IVY™ platform, built in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifies COMPREDICT’s ability to manage large scale OEM deployments of its in-vehicle predictive maintenance and diagnostics algorithms. This makes COMPREDICT hardware and OS platform agnostic while reducing connectivity costs for the vehicle maker.

Stéphane Foulard, COMPREDICT’s CEO said: “We are more than happy to welcome not only two new shareholders but two new strong partners on board. As a strategic investor, BlackBerry delivers synergies with its IVY platform, which provides a competitive advantage by allowing us to seamlessly integrate our virtual sensors directly into vehicles. Vehice makers will greatly benefit by extending our Virtual Sensors from the cloud to the vehicle’s edge. Vektor Partners is for us the perfect growth-hacking partner: they bring strong tech-business experience, understanding and vision, as well as a wide network to the table, coupled with a deep comprehension of our technology and of our USPs. Together with our existing shareholders and our team, we are looking forward to scaling COMPREDICT’s groundbreaking technology and have it become a standard in all production vehicles.”

Sebastian Bihari, General Partner at Vektor Partners, said: “COMPREDICT’s technology goes to the heart of the revolution in transportation platforms, where data and software open entirely new business opportunities, and have the potential to significantly impact the economics of vehicle makers, operators and their customers at the same time. The beauty of COMPREDICT’s technology is that it can replace physical sensors in vehicles, generate insights that physical sensors cannot, and eventually can provide redundancy in situations where a physical sensor fails. The team can look back on a strong track record in working with vehicle makers globally already and we are looking forward to joining COMPREDICT on their journey of growth.”

Anooj Shah, Senior Director, Investments & Strategy at BlackBerry, said: “COMPREDICT’s industry-leading virtual sensing technology combined with deep transportation domain expertise matches BlackBerry IVY’s vision of enabling advanced vehicle data insights for vehicle makers and the broader transportation ecosystem. We are thrilled to bring them into the BlackBerry IVY ecosystem to support their mission of making accurate predictive maintenance and vehicle diagnostics more accessible and enable vehicle makers to transform these insights into new service offerings.”

Marc Pasquet, Director of the Services & Solutions Business Line, Michelin, added: "COMPREDICT's new fundraising is a confirmation of its technology and growth potentials. As a partner and early investor, MICHELIN is looking forward to continuing the collaboration with COMPREDICT on connected solutions for fleet management."

About COMPREDICT

At COMPREDICT we encourage sustainable mobility. Our mission is to transfer vehicle data into vehicle insights. We consider vehicle health & usage monitoring as an essential part of sustainable vehicle lifecycle to maximize utilization and minimize environmental footprint. Our virtual sensors’ technology provides insights for any type of vehicle, regardless of its development stage, either embedded or as a cloud solution. We aim at closing the loop between development, usage & service of vehicles for a brighter and safer future of transportation.

About Vektor Partners

We back visionary and globally minded founders of scalable B2B businesses operating at the technological frontier of AI-enabled applications, computer vision, software-definability, and next-gen compute power, with a strong focus on economic resilience, as well as defense and security applications.  The firm's most recent fund is dedicated to opportunities in the transportation, logistics, and supply chain space - a sector that is an early adopter of new technologies.  We are early-stage investors, and our ‘home’ are Seed to Series A rounds with initial investments typically in the range of €1-5m.  We mainly invest in Europe in globally oriented founders who we support with our deep network and partners across Europe, the US, and the MENA region.

‍