DRIVECAM
CEO: Brandon Nixon.
Financial information: Raised $60 million in venture capital funding.
No. of local employees: 90.
Investors: Several venture capital firms, including Menlo Ventures and JMI Equity.
Headquarters: Kearny Mesa.
Year founded: 1998.
Company description: Provides recording equipment for vehicles to help drivers avoid collisions.
Rather than talking about the number of customers, DriveCam prefers to focus on the number of vehicles carrying its audio and video recording systems aimed at preventing traffic accidents.
The company said the count is about 150,000, up 25 percent from about 120,000 in the prior year. It won a major contract last year when it signed up Sysco Corp., which is installing DriveCam’s systems into all 9,000 of its trucks. In 2010, the company also signed up the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority and its 1,500 buses traversing the nation’s capital.
“Our sweet spot is a client that has more than 500 vehicles in their fleet, and some of our largest customers have up to 10,000 vehicles in their fleet,” said Brandon Nixon, DriveCam’s chief executive officer.
Privately held DriveCam won’t reveal sales, but said its bookings of new business flew off the charts last year, increasing 87 percent from the prior year’s bookings.
The mission of DriveCam is giving companies and their drivers a better understanding of how they’re doing their jobs so they can avoid collisions. Nixon said once systems are installed, they identify 10 percent to 20 percent of drivers who have a proclivity to taking unnecessary risks.
By showing the drivers what they’re doing wrong, and coaching them, the systems have vastly improved drivers’ performances, reducing both the number of accidents and insurance costs, he said.
The systems are mounted on a vehicle’s rear-view mirror with camera lenses pointing to the driver and outside the vehicle through the windshield. The recording equipment is triggered whenever a vehicle makes a sudden stop, accelerates too quickly, or deviates from a prescribed range of movement.
$230 Billion Price Tag
Nixon cites an industry statistic on the enormous cost of accidents: about $230 billion a year in this country.
“It’s a staggering number. It’s about 2 percent of our GDP (gross domestic product), and just from vehicles running into each other,” he said.
In one recorded incident that DriveCam has, a truck driver, who is eating while driving (against company policy), is following another vehicle too closely as it approaches an intersection. The truck in front makes a sudden stop, forcing the driver of the DriveCam-equipped vehicle to also come to an abrupt stop. Though there was no contact, the incident reveals the reason behind the abrupt stop by the vehicle in front — a pedestrian standing close to the street.
If the driver reacted a split second slower, the truck would have plowed into the vehicle in front, and likely would have killed the pedestrian, said Nixon.
Besides showing fleet drivers the errors they can avoid in the future, the systems can also prove a driver wasn’t at fault in an accident. They provide fleets with clear proof to dismiss wrongful litigation, Nixon said.
Satisfied Customer
Lloyd Pest Control, based in El Cajon, hired DriveCam in a pilot program several years ago as a way to reduce an increasing collision rate by drivers. During the program, the business saved about $10,000 at one branch alone, prompting Lloyd to implement it on a companywide basis.
“It’s worked well for us,” said Eric Paysen, technical director. “It’s a unique tool that gives us a method for coaching drivers so that they eliminate problematic behaviors.”
DriveCam was the outgrowth of a road rage incident experienced by founder Gary Rayner in the mid-1990s. He was so frustrated about the near accident, he set out to put together a video recording system that could capture an event, Nixon said.
Since its launch in 1998, DriveCam has attracted more than $60 million in venture capital funding, according to Nixon. Investors include Menlo Ventures, JMI Equity, Insight Venture Partners and Triangle Peak Partners LP.
Those equity partners may influence DriveCam going public someday, but Nixon said he’s more focused on growing DriveCam and guiding it to become the best in class business.
“I think we can build a $1 billion company out of DriveCam, given the market’s size,” he said. “It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s in stages, but the size of the market and the amount of waste is so big, and we’re coming at it from such a different perspective, there’s no reason we can’t build a billion-dollar company.”