automotive-software
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vAuto taught dealers to sell faster. Then it changed its mind.
Selling more cars can still mean making less money. vAuto’s answer was to rethink the clock - and treat every used vehicle as a different investment.
Toyota Connected North America: The company behind the SOS button
A red button is a small promise with a large engineering bill. Toyota Connected North America builds the cloud software, call-center tools and in-car experiences that help Toyota and Lexus keep it.
Dealer Inspire and the expensive art of the extra button
The dealership technology company grew by connecting the pieces of online car shopping. Its next challenge is teaching dealers how much they can gain by taking a few pieces away.
myKaarma and the Price of Being Kept Waiting
An oil change, a missing coupon, and an unanswered phone helped shape myKaarma. Its wager: the awkward gaps between repairs matter almost as much as the repairs themselves.
Affinitiv and the sale that never ends
The car leaves the lot. The business does not. Affinitiv turns the years between purchases into a series of service appointments, useful reminders, and reasons to come back.
AutoAlert and the buyer hiding in the service lane
The next car sale may begin with an oil change. AutoAlert turns a dealership’s own customer records into reasons to call, offers to make and vehicles to buy.
PCMI and the Case of the Missing Emails
A warranty claim can spend more time in an inbox than in an adjuster’s hands. PCMI built a business around moving it along - and its customers reveal why the paperwork matters as much as the prediction.
Gubagoo and the car deal that forgot its own price
A shopper builds a deal online. A salesperson starts it again in the showroom. Gubagoo has built a business around making those two encounters remember each other.
Vingstech and the art of filling the gap
A recruiter that also speaks the language of vehicle controllers and enterprise systems offers a useful lesson: the missing piece of a technology project is often a person.
The Boring Part That Makes a Car Smart
Apex.AI sells the software beneath the clever features: the part that moves data on time, survives a safety audit, and still works when a prototype becomes a production vehicle.
The Car Crossed a Border. Globetouch Made Sure Its Signal Could.
A connected car can leave the showroom in one country and drive into another. Globetouch built the hidden control room that let automakers keep the connection, the service and the customer relationship intact.
Auto Avaliar built a business on the car you trade in
The Brazilian platform connects vehicle appraisals with dealers ready to buy. Stellantis paid €54 million to increase its stake to 95% - and the company is taking its model from used cars to heavy machinery.
CitNOW taught car dealers to show. Now it wants them to remember.
A personalised video can explain a repair. CitNOW Group is betting that connected software can keep the whole dealership conversation from getting lost.
Wayve Raised $2.5 Billion to Teach One AI Driver Every Road
The London company skipped hand-coded rules and high-definition maps for a driving model that learns from experience. Its harder test begins now: turning an elegant research bet into ordinary cars and rides people can actually buy.
Toyota’s Cars Produce a Torrent of Data. This London Team Makes It Useful.
Toyota Connected Europe sits behind the app, the fleet dashboard and the data pipe - turning signals from connected cars into services people can understand and Toyota can operate.
The 45-Year-Old Software Company Teaching Car Dealers a New Dashboard
Pinewood.AI spent decades hidden inside a dealership empire. Now it is selling one database, fewer bolt-ons and automotive-trained AI to dealers around the world - with a £545 million take-private deal waiting at the next junction.
The Software Company Asking Linux to Show Its Work
Codethink built a consultancy by fixing the plumbing beneath cars, medical devices and financial systems. Its bolder project is to make open-source software acceptable where a bug can become a safety case.
A Third Recall Sent Him Back to the Dealer. So He Built the Software Layer Carmakers Were Missing
Sibros started with an irritating question: why should a software bug require a trip to the dealership? Its answer grew into a cloud control room for the messy, safety-critical life of a modern vehicle.
VINCUE Built One Dashboard for the Seven Systems Hiding Behind Every Used Car
A Kansas City dealer was using seven systems to manage one piece of inventory. VINCUE turned that frustration into a single operating layer - and now it is teaching dealership software to anticipate the next decision.
The $40 Million Bet That a 45-Second Video Can Fix the Least Trusted Room in the Car Business
TruVideo turned a mechanic’s phone camera into a trust machine for dealerships. Now, backed by $40 million, it is trying to turn 80 million videos into the operating data layer for every business where seeing is believing.
The Software Company You Notice Only When Everything Goes Wrong
Wind River put an operating system on Mars, watched it stumble, and helped patch it from Earth. Four decades later, its business still rests on the same promise: make complicated machines behave when the deadline is literal.
Volkswagen Tried to Build One Brain for Nine Car Brands. CARIAD Learned Where Not to Do It Alone
CARIAD was supposed to give Volkswagen a single software spine. Delays, executive turnover and billions in annual losses forced a more useful idea: own the layers that create leverage, and partner for the ones that do not.
The Car Dealer’s Paper Folder Became a Data Business - Here’s What Operators Can Steal
iPacket began by replacing a 20-page folder nobody enjoyed assembling. Four thousand dealer partners later, its real product is not the packet - it is the proof that helps a car, a salesperson and a price survive scrutiny.
The Startup That Turned 73 Million Ignored Recall Letters Into a Money Machine
A Marine-turned-car-dealer got stuck with 42 recall notices and no phone numbers. His fix became a platform that has booked over a million VINs and turned the auto industry's most-ignored paperwork into a service department growth engine.
OEC Turned the Parts Counter Into Infrastructure
Born to replace phone-and-fax parts orders, OEC now sits between the companies that build vehicles and the people who put them back on the road - turning scattered inventory, repair procedures and paperwork into one connected workflow.
Solera Holdings, LLC.
Solera sits behind the moments when a car is claimed, repaired, sold, tracked, or returned to the road. Its advantage is not one famous app, but a deep reservoir of vehicle data wired into the daily work of insurers, shops, dealers, and fleets.
Excelfore Corporation
Excelfore Corporation is a Fremont, California software company that builds the connectivity layer for software-defined vehicles. Its flagship eSync platform delivers secure over-the-air (OTA) updates and bi-directional data pipelines between the cloud and every electronic control unit inside a vehicle, while its in-vehicle networking stacks (Automotive Ethernet, TSN/AVB) and eDatX data-aggregation and edge-AI products round out an end-to-end cloud-to-edge toolkit. Founded by the brothers behind MARGI Systems, Excelfore helped create the industry-wide eSync Alliance and today has technology deployed across more than 17 million vehicles worldwide.
Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies
Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies (RV Tech) is a 50/50 joint venture launched in November 2024 that fuses Rivian's software and electrical-hardware know-how with Volkswagen Group's global manufacturing scale. Co-headquartered in Palo Alto, it builds the zonal electrical architecture, operating systems, in-vehicle AI, and cloud-connectivity stack that will power next-generation software-defined vehicles across Volkswagen, Audi, Scout, Rivian, and more - aiming to make every new car smarter, cheaper to build, and continuously upgradable over the air.
Ottometric
Ottometric is a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that uses AI to automate the validation and training of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. Its platform distills petabyte-scale, multimodal sensor data into decision-ready KPIs, cutting validation cost and time by more than half for the Tier-1 suppliers and OEMs that build the cars' eyes and reflexes.
STRADVISION
STRADVISION is a Korean automotive AI company building SVNet, a deep-learning vision perception software that lets cars see and understand the road in real time. Its lightweight networks run on low-power automotive chips and ship in production vehicles from more than a dozen global automakers.