An Irish company that uses AI to stop crashes before drivers see them coming has raised up to €49m to expand in North America and Europe.
CameraMatics, founded in Dublin in 2016, makes a video-telematics platform for commercial fleets. Its cameras and software watch the road and the cab at the same time.
The system flags a cyclist in a lorry’s blind spot, a driver drifting out of lane, or signs of fatigue and phone use, then turns the footage into a regulator-ready compliance report.
The funding is led by the UK growth investor Blume Equity, alongside the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, the state’s sovereign development fund, and Goodbody Capital Partners, which invested on behalf of the bank AIB.
The ‘up to €49m’ figure is worth reading carefully. It mixes new growth capital with a partial cash-out for early backers such as Sure Valley Ventures, while Salica Investments continues to provide debt. Existing investors, including Puma Growth Partners and Enterprise Ireland, are staying on.
Taking on the US giants #
CameraMatics now serves nearly 1,000 fleet customers across the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe and the US, among them Royal Mail, Calor Gas, XPO and DFDS.
It employs more than 150 people across seven offices, from Dublin and Waterford to London, Amsterdam, Barcelona and the United States, and says it is on track to pass €30m in contracted recurring revenue this year. It is one of a growing crop of Irish tech firms scaling abroad with state backing.
The pull is a market being reshaped by regulation. New EU road-safety rules and tighter UK fleet-governance requirements are turning connected cameras from a nice-to-have into a must-have.
Berg Insight expects the installed base of video-telematics systems in North America to more than double, to 17.3 million units, by 2030. The same shift is pushing fleets toward the kind of connected, lower-emission operations CameraMatics also sells.
That is why the competition is fierce. CameraMatics is up against well-funded American incumbents, chiefly Samsara, which booked $1.9bn in annual recurring revenue last year, and the driver-safety specialist Lytx.
‘Our mission is simple but ambitious,’ said co-founder and chief executive Mervyn O’Callaghan: ‘to reduce driving and work-related accidents to zero.’
The company has the customers, the retention and now the capital. The hard part, winning enterprise deals in the US without losing ground in Europe, where the buyers and rivals are very different, starts now. It is the same scaling test facing European AI-for-the-road champions like Wayve.
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