Cambridge Mobile Telematics Inc., which uses smartphone data in order to analyze the behavior of drivers on the road, today became the latest beneficiary of SoftBank Corp’s $100 billion Vision Fund.

The eight-year-old startup, which was born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, landed a hefty $500 million in funding from the Vision Fund. It plans to use the money to continue developing its products and grow its customer base.

The company said in a press release that its products are aimed primarily at insurance firms, helping them to measure customers’ driving performance to better inform their pricing. The products can also be used to provide incentives to drivers who drive safely and automate certain parts of the claims process.

CMT sells software that relies on smartphone sensors to measure “distracted driving” and other metrics that can be used to determine the price of a driver’s insurance policy. The company also builds connected devices that can be installed in cars and send out an alert should an accident occur. Those devices can also assess the vehicle’s performance for actuarial scoring.

Hari Balakrishnan, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the company has “helped make roads safer by making drivers better in a world where crashes are rising due to factors like distracted driving.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the size of the funding amount isn’t such a surprise because digital transformation is affecting all industries. He said telematics is a key area of disruption where previously unknown behavior can now be converted into data streams and be used to help determine business relationships.

“CMT is one of the more obscure enterprise software vendors in this space, but it is well positioned to take advantage of this transformation,” Mueller said. “But to do so it needs to invest more into its product, and that’s where SoftBank’s investment comes in handy. Now we have to see how many CMT powered devices will become part of our future relationships with insurers and other risk measuring enterprises.”

SoftBank has been aggressively investing into all manner of tech companies over the last couple of years, with most of the money coming from the massive $98 billion Vision Fund. The automotive sector has been a key area of interest for SoftBank, which notably acquired a 15 percent stake in ride-sharing company Uber Technologies Inc. last December.

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