Linkbycar, Moove Lab’s 8th promotion startup – the only acceleration program dedicated to mobility and autotech startups at Station F, co-founded by Mobilians and Via ID – offers a SaaS solution for collecting, processing and integrating data from all types of vehicles, dedicated to players in the automotive sector.
Linkbycar: simplified access to data on all types of vehicles
Founded in 2021 – by Ahmed Salem Soumare, Saidou Soumare, Charles Cagon and Eric Navarro – Linkbycar offers a solution to collect, process and aggregate data from all types of vehicles (thermal, electric, connected), in order to ease automotive services (insurance, maintenance, servicing, warranty) and their development.
“For several years now, the majority of vehicles sold by car manufacturers have been equipped with telematic boxes. These boxes provide a lot of information, which is unilaterally used by manufacturers to improve their vehicle range, production lines and optimize their sales. This data could also enable automotive service providers to make predictive maintenance, customized and scalable insurance, fleet management, etc.” explains Ahmed.
Linkbycar has developed a solution that allows:
- Integrate – in a simple and smart way – both the data and the algorithms that give it meaning.
- Obtain – regardless of the car manufacturer – clear and structured data.
- Simplify and reduce data acquisition time and costs, as well as costs related to certain mobility services (R&D, claims reconstruction, etc.)
How?
Linkbycar works in partnership with manufacturers – currently 18 car brands, including Stellantis, Mercedes and BMW – collects data from each vehicle’s telematic box, aggregates the data and integrates it into a universal SaaS platform that can benefit many mobility players (insurance, maintenance, warranty and service companies).
Their tool is connected to the car manufacturers’ APIs, which allows them to collect the data in order to normalize it and make it accessible on their platform.
Since each player has a different need, the startup simplifies the search by sorting the data and giving access to a specific data typology, presented in the form of a package that can be customized according to the customer.
“If an insurer wants to reconstruct a claim and needs to know the angular rotation of the steering wheel, whether the driver engaged his turn signal, etc. Linkbycar provides this specific information as a package via the SaaS platform,” explains Ahmed. Linkbycar, which currently collects data from more than 48,000 vehicles, also addresses the issue of consent by providing an automatic driver consent management system. Companies don’t have to worry about data privacy because the work is done upstream.
How did they get the idea for this project?
The startup was created following an intrapreneurship project thought up by Ahmed – one of the 4 co-founders – at Stellantis (formerly PSA), major car manufacturer, where he worked for 3 years.
The 3 other co-founders then joined the project: Eric Navarro, who worked for 2 years at Stellantis with Ahmed on software development for vehicle diagnostics. Charles Cagon, Ahmed’s former classmate at ESIEA (engineering school), specialized in data science. And Saidou Soumare, who is now responsible for the Linkbycar infrastructure.
“The project was interesting enough that they asked for its development. For intellectual property reasons, we decided to found Linkbycar,” says Ahmed.
What is Linkbycar’s added value?
Our added value lies in the intelligence we develop: the fact that we produce learning systems that can detect anomalies on a specific range of vehicles, for example. We don’t just provide raw data, we provide data enriched by learning algorithms, which allows our customers to have turnkey solutions to do predictive maintenance, vehicle diagnostics, driver profiling, etc.
Startup from Moove Lab’s 8th promotion: “The Moove Lab brought us business”
“We applied to the Moove Lab for 3 main reasons:
- Its ecosystem and its network of partners that cover all mobility businesses. It allowed us to be directly connected to these players, to experiment and evaluate our solution in relation to their needs.
- The opportunity to be guided by experts and be able to improve our product.
- The location at Station F and the access to this very interesting entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially around mobility.
Beyond the training and the very enriching workshops, the Moove Lab brought us business. In particular, it allowed us to contact key people in order to concretize the partnership with BWM, quickly and efficiently.”
The next steps for Linkbycar
- The integration of new algorithms in their SaaS platform, which will allow customers to autonomously manage the type of data they are interested in, to perform vehicles predictive maintenance, to profile the driving behavior of the driver-vehicle pair, etc.
- The development of their platform on a European scale. The startup is strategically targeting certain countries – more advanced on the subject of connected vehicles – including Spain, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium.
- The creation of a marketplace to connect all mobility players by 2023.