Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, is leading a US$17.5-million investment in Teralytics, a Swiss software company building a platform to provide advanced mobility analytics powered by telecom network data.

It uses proprietary artificial intelligence to extrapolate insights, anonymized and aggregated. This enables customers such as mobility providers, cities and transport services to understand, predict and improve people’s journeys.

A study conducted by MarketsandMarkets on the “Transportation Systems and Analytics Market” has estimated this market at US$57.46 billion in 2018, at an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.4% from 2013 to 2018.

Together with RBVC, other strategic and financial investors participating in the round include Deutsche Bahn Digital Ventures, innogy Ventures, LBBW Venture Capital, Liil Ventures, alongside existing investors Atomico and Lakestar.

Due to the growing population and the trend that more and more people live in urban areas, mobility flows in cities are changing and new modes of transportation such as ride-sharing, bike-sharing and e-scooters are appearing. Meanwhile, cities are striving to understand how new technologies and services impact their residents, with little or no valid data upon which to base critical planning and operational decisions.

As the concepts of private car ownership or scheduled transportation give way to mobility-on-demand, these dynamics will accelerate, generating ever more complex questions requiring data to solve them.

Simply throwing new modes of transportation at challenges such as congestion, traffic safety, crowded public transportation and long wait times, without a thorough understanding of how all people travel, is not delivering the desired results. There is a need for unbiased, all-encompassing insights into people’s journeys across all modes of transportation, in real-time. Human mobility is changing beyond recognition. The next ten years will bring a seismic shift in mobility technologies, comparable to the impact that transistor and personal computer advancements had on miniaturization and digitalization.

—Alastair MacLeod, CEO at Teralytics

Zurich based Teralytics, with offices in New York and Singapore, partners with telecom network operators to solve the challenge of understanding human mobility on population scale with the most accurate indicator of people’s movement—their ever-present mobile devices.

Teralytics receives anonymized cell tower signal data and turns them into aggregated mobility behavior of groups of people, thereby being fully compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Teralytics is developing global mobility insights and analytics solutions to better understand how people travel and how new modes of transportation affect the entire transport network.