Mojio Inc.

Market position

Mojio positions itself as a platform supplier in the connected mobility market, with deployments cited across European, Canadian and U.S. markets and reference customers among major mobile network operators. Coverage in 2019 described it as having grown from a startup in Microsoft's startup program to a competitive player in the connected mobility space, and it ranked second on Deloitte's 2018 list of the 50 fastest-growing Canadian technology companies. Competing OBD-II connected-car products existed at the time of its 2014 launch, with the company arguing the addressable market of roughly 800 million unconnected cars on the road, plus about 200 million to be sold without connectivity over the following five to six years, was large enough for multiple players.

Mojio emphasizes a hardware-agnostic architecture and a broad API suite that lets partners integrate connected car services into their own products, together with cloud scalability and latency suitable for millions of vehicles and security, privacy and performance standards required by automotive and telecom customers. Vivint's CTO cited the flexible hardware approach, the API suite and the company's roadmap and leadership team as reasons for selecting the platform.

Technology

A globally scalable, hardware-agnostic cloud platform for connected vehicles, built on Microsoft Azure IoT capabilities and organized into a telematics engine, Mobility Studio, services ecosystem and intelligence toolkit, with APIs used by partners to build their own applications. It ingests and analyzes vehicle and driving data—including diagnostics codes, GPS location, trips, fuel consumption and driving behavior—and supports both embedded and OBD-II retrofit hardware.

Go-to-market

Mojio primarily reaches end users through partners that white-label or bundle its services, including mobile network operators such as Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile and TELUS, smart-home provider Vivint, and automakers. It also works with Bosch, combining Mojio's cloud platform and SaaS products with Bosch's automotive technologies to deploy connected mobility services, and has partnered with Jobber on integrated fleet tracking for home service businesses. Several strategic investors, including Assurant and Bosch, are also customers or partners.

Mobile network operators, automotive OEMs, insurers, fleet operators and businesses, and individual vehicle owners.

Geography

Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with a U.S. office relocated in 2019 from Palo Alto to Campbell, California; approximately 100 employees at that time were roughly split between California and Vancouver. Mojio serves customers in Europe, Canada and the United States, and has supported Deutsche Telekom-branded connected car launches in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland.

History

Founded in Vancouver in 2012, Mojio launched its first OBD-II connected car device and app in late 2014 under co-founder and CEO Jay Giraud. Kenny Hawk became CEO in 2015 and built out a leadership team in Silicon Valley, including vice-presidents of engineering, operations, global sales and emerging products, while senior directors of engineering and technical services led the Vancouver office. A Series B round first closed in late 2017 at about US$23-million, led by Kensington Capital Partners, and was extended to US$40-million by February 2019 with participation from strategic investors Assurant and Bosch. The company remains a Canadian corporation on a legal basis.

Risks & controversies

Mojio's CEO said the company could not recruit all the talent it needed in Vancouver and built executive functions and staffing in the United States; it also fell short of its stated goal of reaching 1.5 million connected cars by late 2018, reporting 850,000 vehicles in February 2019. It operates in a market with multiple competing connected-car products.