Wejo Group Ltd was a British connected vehicle data start-up founded by entrepreneur Richard Barlow, headquartered in

Greater Manchester Greater Manchester is a ceremonial county in North West England. It borders Lancashire to the north, Derbyshire and West Yorkshire to the east, Cheshire to the south, and Merseyside to the west. Its largest settlement is the city of Manchester. ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. Wejo collected in near-real-time 14.6 billion data points and analyzed 66 million journeys across a network of 10.7 million live vehicles from a supply base of over 50 million connected vehicles. The Company offered a trading platform for connected car data and analytics. Wejo served customers worldwide and was founded in 2013. The company, which was backed by General Motors, went through a special purpose acquisition (SPAC) merger in 2021. The merger raised $330M for Wejo including $230M from the SPAC company Virtuoso and the other $125M from

private investment in public equity A private investment in public equity, often called a PIPE deal, involves the selling of publicly traded common shares or some form of preferred stock or convertible security to private investors. It is an allocation of shares in a public compan ...

(PIPE) financing. Wejo called in administrators at the end of May 2023, following a loss of investment capital.

History

Wejo was founded in 2013 above a Greek restaurant in

Manchester Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...

. Wejo, stands for "we journey," and at start-up it raised $157 million according to PitchBook from such investors as General Motors, which acquired a significant stake in 2019, German auto supplier Hella, DIP Capital and the British government. In November 2019, Wejo opened a second UK office in the centre of

's technology and enterprise zone. Wejo participated in 3 rounds of funding following its founding and raised $120.2M in capital. At one point, it was classed as one of the UK’s prospective billion dollar-valued firms. At the end of May 2023, Wejo called in administrators as it ran out of investment capital.

Partnerships

In June 2021 it was announced that Wejo would partner with Waycare to deliver a joint offering to 20 locations across the United States, with Wejo’s data supplementing Waycare’s existing data sources, providing traffic managers with a comprehensive understanding of conditions and the ability to not only detect and predict incidents, but also respond faster and more effectively based on real-world, near real-time data in a single platform from which they can all collaborate. On 29 June 2021, it was announced that

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and Japanese insurance giant Sompo had joined Palantir in partnering with Wejo.

Technology

Wejo streamed high volumes of anonymized vehicle data direct from the automotive manufacturer in real-time, before cleansing, normalizing, and processing it. It also standardized the data across data sources to ensure consistency. The data was delivered from the vehicle source to the end-user customer within 32 seconds. Wejo had the largest number of accessible connected vehicles on its platform, with 42 million in 2019. Up to July 2020, Wejo had curated over 140 billion miles of data.

References

{{Reflist, 2 British companies established in 2013 Companies based in Manchester Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq