Eatron®, a fast-growing scale-up with its unique ‘intelligent automotive software‘ platform for the edge and the cloud announced that it raised $11M in its Series-A round led by MMC Ventures with participation from Aster Capital and Vinfast.
Eatron has a long-standing collaboration in different projects with Vinfast to explore and accelerate deployment of the company’s software platform into Vinfast’s rapidly expanding range of electric cars. Eatron entered into a similar strategic partnership with the Hirschvogel Group from Germany in the summer of 2020 when Hirschvogel also invested $1.5M+.
Eatron, which is headquartered in the UK with a world-class R&D centre in Istanbul, has developed a unique software platform – spanning from the edge to the cloud – which is driving significant innovation in the continuous optimization of performance, efficiency and safety of software-defined electric vehicles.
Eatron’s innovative technology enables OEMs and Tier-1s to de-couple complex embedded automotive software from the underlying electronic hardware through abstraction and rapidly deploy such software for serial production. The company already has major program wins with OEMs which are going into production from Q1 2022.
Eatron’s platform currently offers highly differentiated software applications for battery management (BMS), intelligent motion control, and advanced driver assistance (ADAS) for serial production. Eatron’s unique modular platform approach increases supplier choice for OEMs and significantly reduces cost, risks and time to market. Each Eatron software application running on the edge is powered by AI and designed to have a cloud counterpart with analytics, offering OTA updates and continuous software improvements to achieve superior performance and reliability over the lifetime of the vehicles.
Part of the Series-A funding will be used to expand the platform with additional partnerships for third-party software modules and semiconductor & hardware component suppliers. The company already has a growing list of such partnerships with majors which it plans to announce in due course.
Because of its unique platform approach and highly differentiated technology, Eatron has seen strong demand for its offering with revenues increasing more than 500% during the past 12 months. Eatron is currently running several advanced development programs with leading semiconductor suppliers and Tier-1s and therefore continuously increasing its global network of supported automotive electronics and system suppliers.
The new investment will further accelerate the development and deployment of new embedded and cloud-based intelligent features as well as fuelling an ambitious global growth of Eatron development teams in the UK, Turkey, and China. As part of its global expansion Eatron will grow its sales teams in Germany, India and the USA. This is expected to create more than 50 new jobs globally in the coming year in addition to the 50 jobs it created during the past 12 months.
Dr Umut Genc, co-founder and CEO at Eatron:
“Mobility and Automotive in particular, is in the middle of a dramatic transformation and as part of this change needs to become a software-driven industry. Intelligent automotive software platform, embedded at the edge and connected to the cloud, will play a critical role in this transformation. For Eatron, this is a platform and data play – where we make a big difference with a unique synthesis of functional safety, machine learning, advanced controls, connectivity and cloud analytics for production grade customisable automotive software components. This helps OEMs and Tier-1s to develop connected intelligent software-defined electric vehicles faster, better, and hence enables them to stay ahead of their competition”.
Mina Samaan, Investor at MMC Ventures:
“Everywhere you look today, all governments across the world are committing to driving incentives for increasing electric vehicles and autonomy on the roads over the next five years. Yet while some automotive OEMs have built and released capabilities, the majority are significantly behind. We have seen many software businesses building interesting algorithmic concepts to support these OEMs, but none have had the expertise to meet the regulatory, security and safety requirements for automotive production. Eatron is the exception. Its software has been built from the ground up to be automotive grade and has the potential to drive the battery and autonomy features in hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the coming years.”