Chris Carver of ATG
Chris Carver of ATG

Truck drivers, motorcyclists and daily commuters may navigate the same routes each day, but not all motorists have the same driving skills or employ the same safety tactics on the road.

That makes life challenging for insurance companies, which mine mountains of data to make sure they have policies in place that best reflect the driving behavior of each motorist.

A Seattle startup by the name of ATG Risk Solutions — founded last year by Chris Carver, a veteran of the insurance and navigation industries who most recently led Liberty Mutual’s telematics risk management insurance program — has a novel approach to this problem.

ATG, which today announced about $1 million in seed funding from the Alliance of Angels, an undisclosed insurance company and Hearst, the publishing giant that owns several automobile-related magazine titles and operates a division known as Motor Information Systems, is creating the equivalent of a FICO score for individual drivers.

Think about it as an individual driver’s safety score.

Carver said that ATG is crunching terabytes of data, collected from telematics service providers, state departments of transportation, self-insured fleets, collision data and other traffic services, in order to answer questions like: How do truck drivers at Charlie’s Produce in Seattle perform compared to other similar drivers at trucking fleets.

“We’ve created the driving equivalent of a FICO score — an assessment of your driving behavior — so insurance companies can charge you more accurately based on how, when and where you drive,” said Carver, who previously worked at Magellan GPS and co-founded a Victoria, B.C.-based company by the name of FleetPoint.

It may seem a bit Orwellian to have that much data collected on each individual driver or fleet, but Carver said the information can radically change the insurance business as we know it.

“We believe that data analytics will drive sweeping changes in how auto insurance policies are rated and priced, how road use charges are calculated and applied, and how transportation systems are designed and managed in the 21st century,” he said.

The Snapshot dongle from Progressive
The Snapshot dongle from Progressive

The idea behind ATG is not a new one, though its approach is somewhat different.

Insurance giant Progressive rolled out its Snapshot program in 2008, measuring all sorts of individual driving behavior, from the number of miles driven to how hard brakes are depressed. The Snapshot includes a small device that plugs into a car’s OBD-II diagnostic port, tracking all major aspects of a driver’s behavior. Those who install the device can get discounts on insurance rates.

Concerns have been raised about the security of the Snapshot device, and Carver said that the project has not worked as well as some have though it would given the lack of data collected.

At Liberty Mutual Insurance, Carver attempted to tackle the challenge, but he said even with the insurance giant’s size, the company did not have enough data to mine in order to make the results meaningful.

At ATG, he said they’ve created the world’s largest commercial vehicle telematics-insurance database. Known as the ATG Clearinghouse, this database has detailed information on how, when and where vehicles are driven. At this point, Carver said they’ve collected about 12 billion miles of driving data, a number that they are hoping to increase to 270 billion miles in the coming year.

The new cash infusion at ATG will be used for the commercial launch of the service, with Carver saying that it plans to announce its insurance carrier partners in the next few weeks. The company also has received grant money from the U.S Department of Transportation.

The company employs 10 people in Pioneer Square, and plans to continue growing the team.

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