Fleet vehicle payment solution provider Car IQ has raised $15m in Series B funding to accelerate market adoption of its offering.
The ‘oversubscribed’ round was led by Forté Ventures and joined by new investors including Ally Ventures, BlackBerry, State Farm Ventures, and TELUS Ventures.
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By GlobalDataExisting backers Citi Ventures, Alpana Ventures, Avanta Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and Scrum Ventures also participated in the round.
Car IQ provides a contactless payment network, enabling connected cars and trucks to make payments to merchants and service providers without a credit card.
It allows vehicles to pay for a range of services including tolling, fuelling, and parking without adding any extra hardware to the vehicle.
The company said that its patent-pending ‘Know Your Machine’ technology is the foundation for the first machine payment network that authenticates vehicles, facilitating direct vehicle-initiated transactions.
This is said to remove the need for human use of credit cards to process the billions spent annually on fleet vehicle services.
Car IQ aims to tap the $650bn spent each year on vehicle services using credit cards, debit cards, and ACH.
Existing payment methods, which requires people to perform and manage the transaction, are considered costly, hard to reconcile, and susceptible to fraud.
It also poses security risks for the fleet operator, merchant, and payment network as customers cannot authenticate the actual vehicle, the service requirements, or validate that the vehicle received a billed-for service.
Car IQ CEO Sterling Pratz said: “Our solution introduces the next generation of contactless payments, taking the logical step of connecting machines directly to banks and service providers and eliminating legacy processes that are difficult to manage or result in fraud.
“We believe machine banking is the future, where not just vehicles but any IoT device will be able to connect and pay autonomously—and it’s our technology that will make it possible.”
Forté Ventures partner Louis Rajczi said: “Car IQ is already working with a number of the largest merchants, payment providers, OEMs, and fleet owners.
“Our investment will allow them to significantly broaden these relationships, expand into new markets, and add features that will significantly enhance the value of the offering.”
In 2019, Car IQ raised $5m in a Series A financing round to scale up its efforts in powering full machine commerce.
The round was led by Quest Venture Partners.
