Wejo was founded in 2014 with four people working above a Greek restaurant in Manchester. It is fast becoming one the biggest companies in the transport data economy. Wejo struck a deal this year that gave General Motors a 35% stake in the British company, and valued it at $275m. Dominic Browne speaks to Wejo’s CEO and founder, Richard Barlow, on using data for good
Imagine you are designing a complicated road junction, a triple deck roundabout or some other complex article of highway engineering. Who would you speak to for help? A consultant who has worked on similar projects perhaps? Maybe an experienced engineer who built such assets before?
Imagine, if you could speak to the cars that had driven over them. And not just the unreliable memories of drivers, but historic data from the exact moment each car had to signal, manoeuvre, break, the turning circles, the stopping distances; if you could aggregate and average and design for sight lines and desire lines and reaction times using the exact human reactions of billions of miles of driving.
Likewise, imagine if you were designing a car itself, or planning traffic management for a major event.
This is value held by Wejo (a portmanteau made from We and Journey) – the ability to use telematics from the journeys of millions of cars; from general traffic movement, to specific travel patterns around events, to collisions to congestion. The company works with motor manufacturers and highway agencies to tell the story of what is actually happening on our roads.
Wejo collects a billion miles of driven data every three days, including 7% of all traffic in New York, and takes traffic data from 95% of roads in American on a daily basis. It takes half its revenue from major OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) in the car industry and half from public sector bodies in the America.
What type of use can its work be put to? Mr Barlow told Highways: ‘There were 218 road worker deaths in the US last year. We are hoping to reduce this significantly through helping change the configuration of roadworks and the speeds around road works for instance by giving data to transport departments.’
When you want to demonstrate that data in itself has value, Wejo is a perfect example.
‘We work with the motor industry Tier one and Tier two. We are an ecosystem for mobility as we take huge amounts of data but we are disrupting markets using data to provide insights and intelligence. We believe in using data for good.
‘We use retrospective analysis on trends based on road design and driver behaviour and provide a consultative service working with traffic agencies, providing a high level of certainty and immediate analysis of road design. We can show before and after on road designs.
‘We can show historical trends, we can do seasonal analysis now. There are potentially thousands of insights we can provide and we pre-agree what the outcomes are.’
Wejo doesn’t work with the insurance industry, nor does it analyse potential safety issues with the cars themselves. In this day and age, it is extremely rare to see faults in cars, so this is by no means the issue it was in the past.
The data is anonymised, which is naturally part of Wejo's business model as it encourages OEMs to share data. Although it is tempting to imagine a world where this data is public and what might happen to, for instance, civil cases against highway authorities, if in the future specific telematics data was regularly used in court.
Mr Barlow started out in financial technology before he saw ‘the nascent value of connected car data’.
‘I want to have transparency around the data a car makes from a journey. I presented the idea to industry that we can be their data supply chain for mobility.’
Despite coming from Manchester and having 170 employees in the UK compared to 30 in the US, up until now the business has done all its work in the States.
‘We just secured our first OEM European clients. We just about to announce three OEM clients in Europe and UK. We are already starting to have very interesting questions about what the market can be [in Europe],’ Mr Barlow reveals.
One gets the feeling this market has only just begun and in this case historical trends might be of little use understanding where it will go next.
