Navdy, the head-up display system for every car, raises $20M
Navdy Inc., the San Francisco-based creator of the tiny head-up display for cars, has closed a $20 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Upfront Ventures with participation from Formation8, Qualcomm Ventures, Promus Ventures, Ludlow Ventures and Wareness.io. The latest round follows Navdy’s highly oversubscribed seed round in August 2014, which raised $6.5 million. At the time, Navdy also secured pre-orders for 17,000 devices at a value of $6 million, bringing the total raised in the last eight months to $33 million.
“If you look down for four seconds while going 60 miles per hour, you’ve just driven a football field blind. I’ve had those same moments during stop-and-go traffic as well,” said Navdy Founder and CEO Doug Simpson of the motivation for founding Navdy.
Measuring just 5-inches-by-4-inches, Navdy is a projector that can plug into a car’s 12V power outlet. If a car has an on board diagnostic port Navdy can be hooked up to display information like speed, RPM, mileage, fuel level, engine status and other data related to a car’s internal systems.
Connecting a smartphone to Navdy requires the Navdy app and a Bluetooth connection. Once connected users can decide what information they want on the head-up display. Navdy supports calls, texts and apps and projects data onto the inside of the car’s windshield. Direct line of sight means drivers don’t have to take their eyes off the road and voice control provides hands-free operation for answering calls and replying to texts. Navdy even has an onboard camera with gesture recognition that allows users to answer or reject calls with a simple swipe.
The company will use the new money to expand its technical team and prepare for the product launch schedule for sometime in the second half of this year.
Navdy was originally slated to ship in early 2014, but Simpson decided to delay shipment to make further improvements to the device. In a note to customers he wrote “From the way information is presented, the clarity of the image, the flexibility of the gesture recognition to the way Navdy sits on your car’s dashboard, we are obsessing over every detail to make sure it’s just right.”
Navdy is still taking pre-orders at $299 with the eventual retail price slated at $499.
Images courtesy Navdy
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