Wejo, the Manchester-based mobility tech specialist has completed a $15.9m fundraise.
The company, which is backed by General Motors, is a global leader in smart mobility cloud and software solutions for connected, electronic and autonomous vehicle data.
The self-arranged private investment in public equity, or PIPE, was anchored by one of its major commercial partners, Sompo International Holdings, as well as some of its own board of directors.
Under the terms of the PIPE, Wejo has agreed to issue and sell in a private placement approximately 11.3m shares.
“Executing a successful capital raise in this economic environment is a major achievement for Wejo and reflects our investors’, partners’, and directors’ confidence in the Company’s ability to improve business fundamentals as we focus our portfolio of solutions around the traffic and insurance product lines,” said Richard Barlow, Wejo Founder and CEO.
“Sompo recognizes Wejo’s significant value proposition, and its new investment will help us continue to advance our Smart Mobility platform. Additionally, our continued commercial partnership will allow the Company to accelerate its entry into the Japanese market. Our proprietary platform and products aim to transform the end-to-end insurance market and help Sompo realize cost synergies and additional revenue opportunities.”
It comes as the company seeks to reduce its cash burn, which was running at $10m per month at the start of 2022. That is expected to reach $5-6m by the end of the year.
As a result it has updated its financial outlook, with its Adjusted EBITDA loss to be between $85m-$95m – that’s an improvement from the previous expectation of $110m-$120m.
“To work through these challenging times in the capital markets, we have taken measurable actions to accelerate our path to profitability, prioritising growth in the marketplaces and SaaS offerings with the highest near-term revenue opportunities. Our long-term plans have not changed other than timing of when other marketplaces will be launched,” added John Maxwell, Chief Financial Officer.
“In addition to successfully raising additional capital through the PIPE offering, we have implemented a hiring freeze, eliminated non-revenue projects, and prioritised workflows to more squarely focus on revenue generation in the current year and into 2023. We will continue to pursue additional cost reduction initiatives, which will help us get to profitability sooner.”
Wejo has trillions of data points collected from approximately 19m vehicles and 79bn journeys to date, across multiple brands, makes and models. it partners with “ethical, like-minded companies and organisations” to turn this data into insights.
It was founded in Manchester in 2014.
