Vehicle Telematics Solutions from Hungary to South America

Inventure Automotive’s management, from left: Zoltán Kánya, Zsolt Nagy and Viktor Nagy.

Inventure Automotive, a vehicle telematics solutions company with a growing number of international clients, is looking to expand and develop .

“We developed our first automotive measuring system based on market demand, where the aim was to discover fuel theft,” CEO Zsolt Nagy explains to the Budapest Business Journal.

Among Eastern European customers, this remains one of the most popular solutions, but times have changed: Inventure now has customers from more than 70 countries.

Originating from an engineering office, the headcount now stands at more than 20, with one or two new hires in both Hungary and abroad monthly.

Inventure defines itself as an OEM-independent in-car technology enabler on the vehicle data aftersales market. According to Nagy, this positions the company in a niche even within the relatively specialist vehicle telematics market.  

“As the ICT sector has been around for a long time to collect, store, and analyze data using a variety of Big Data and AI solutions, this trend is multiplying in our market, the telematics. However, the availability of vehicle data is not nearly as easy as for a conventional IT system,” Nagy argues.  

While the internal communications systems of vehicles are only partially standardized, and manufacturer specific, Inventure’s solution is able to “wiretap” communications between ECUs regardless of the OEM. Apart from basics like fuel level, consumption, and odometer data, the system can transmit a wider range of parameters such as seat occupancy and wiper status.

Profits Up

Inventure closed a profitable 2018, increasing its revenue by 92%, achieving a profit proportion of 25% with a sales revenue of HUF 457 million.

“We are now closely associated and working together not only with value added resellers of global telematics companies, but also with the HQs of these telematics companies,” Nagy adds.

This year, the scale-up company delivered products to the South American reseller network of a major European vehicle manufacturer, where sellers offered the solutions as complementary products alongside the OEM offerings.

Last year, Inventure reached a milestone by selling a database license to one of the largest telematics companies.  

“We could not gain a better professional validation of the quality of the vehicle data we provide, since the license sale was preceded by several months of detailed data analysis and verification by the customer. On the other hand, the purchase has validated the viability of our transforming business model; there is a growing demand on the market not only for our vehicle electronic hardware devices, but huge manufacturers in some vehicle segments also want our licensed know-how.”  

Software components by Inventure are included in the own products of major telematics companies, operating in hundreds of thousands of vehicles worldwide.

Future plans involve fundraising, market segmentation, and focus. Nagy explains that Inventure needs additional capital for long-term plans, as market demands would allow Inventure to grow faster than internal sources can finance.  

“Recently, there has been a growing demand for launching a monthly, cloud-based service where telematics companies can download software to their own tracking device to retrieve data they need for specific vehicles. This cloud-based service design is resource-intensive both from a technical and a business point of view.”  

To enhance its competitiveness, Inventure says it also plans to expand the range of vehicle types supported, as well as the number of parameters.