Autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle insurance company Avinew has acquired fellow auto insurance company Betterdrive.
Avinew will integrate Betterdrive’s technology into its own predictive calculations and pricing discounts system. Following the close of the deal, Betterdrive CEO and founder Ravindhran Sankar will become the joint company’s director of research and development.
Betterdrive, also known as Pear Technology, is an analytics platform which can predict the probability of accidents based on the route, time of day, traffic, and weather conditions. The technology correlates data on weather conditions and geo-located accident data from around two million incidents and can give near real-time risk of route calculations and offer safer alternatives.
An example given is a safe route across San Francisco could lower accident risk by 135 per cent, while adding just three minutes to the drive-time. Another instance could be driving on New Year’s Eve, which is four or five-times riskier than a normal day, due to intoxicated drivers on roads.
By integrating with Avinew, the company hopes it can give customers better transparency and insight on the insurance price they pay and why.
Avinew aims to release its autonomous vehicle insurance products in early 2020. Its machine learning technology and telematics can detect and measure when consumers use a vehicle’s semi-autonomous or autonomous capability responsibly, to safely give them a premium discount.
With Betterdrive’s capabilities, the company will also help policyholders select the safest routes for journeys.
Avinew CTO Randy Adams said, “As mobility undergoes a worldwide transformation, fueled by new technologies, auto insurance needs to change to become dynamic, on-demand and adaptive. Insurance underwriting and risk assessment need to be real-time and algorithmically driven.
“We are building a portfolio of advanced technologies to do just that and our acquisition of Betterdrive will give us preeminent, real-time insights enabling us to provide our customers with discounts and suggestions of safer, alternate routes.”
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