Veniam, Inc., a European startup building what it calls the “Internet of Moving Things”, has raised a $22 million Series B round led by Verizon Ventures. The round included new investors Cisco Investments, Orange Digital Ventures, and Yamaha Motor Ventures. Existing investors Cane Investments, True Ventures and Union Square Ventures also participated.

Founded in 2012 in Portugal and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Veniam provides vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) solutions that effectively turn cars, trucks, buses, boats, or any other vehicles into moving Wi-Fi hotspots and data collecting nodes on the Internet.

Veniam today operates a city-wide vehicular mesh network in Porto, Portugal, consisting of more than 600 vehicles, including fleets of buses, taxis and municipal service vehicles connected via the company’s NetRider mesh networking devices.

Launched in 2013, the Porto project has seen more 300,000 unique users connect to its Wi-Fi network, racking up 1.3 million Internet sessions and 2.3 terabytes of Internet traffic per month.

Smart(er) Cities

The company’s managed services also enable public and private fleets to quickly and cheaply collect vast amounts of data from vehicles and allow smart cities to collect urban data from vehicles and fixed city sensors.

“Veniam’s hardware enables uninterrupted 4G and 5G connectivity, and their cloud-based services empower both private enterprises and city services to act upon valuable security, safety and operational efficiency data to improve the quality of life for all citizens,” said Ed Ruth, Manager at Verizon Ventures in a statement announcing the funding.

Veniam will use the new money on two fronts: expand its platform to deliver managed services via connected vehicles deployed in urban fleets, airports, factories and various other environments where vehicles move people and goods, including New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and London, and to grow its teams in Silicon Valley, Porto and Singapore.

From mobile Wi-Fi hotspots to autonomous vehicles

Veniam has its sights set on becoming the platform of choice for connected and autonomous vehicles.

“The convergence of urban mobility systems, IoT [Internet of Things] wireless technologies, geo-referenced data, and soon the autonomous vehicle, is completely disrupting the way we transport people and goods,” said João Barros, founder and CEO of Veniam in a statement.

Using Veniam’s mesh network of vehicle-to-vehicle and V2X communications, manufacturers of connected and autonomous vehicles will be able to deploy safety applications, run over-the-air software updates and ensure secure communications between vehicles and connected infrastructure.

Including the new round, Veniam has raised $27 million.

Image credit: Richard P J Lambert, Flickr