Inrix, the Kirkland, Wash.-based transportation software and data provider founded in 2004, has raised $10 million from investors, less than a year after the company nearly went public.
A spokesperson confirmed the funding after GeekWire spotted a SEC filing last week.
The company is profitable and is taking on additional capital “to accelerate investment and add staff in a new area of focus for us,” according to the spokesperson.
Inrix has raised $122 million from private investors since it spun out of Microsoft nearly two decades ago. It last raised outside capital in 2014.
Inrix nearly landed a different type of cash infusion earlier this year as it prepared for an IPO. But the company, which has been discussed as an IPO candidate for years, backed out as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other factors led to economic uncertainty.
“We were about two weeks away from filing our documents with the SEC,” said Inrix CEO Bryan Mistele. “We’re on standby right now, waiting to see when the markets and economy improve, in which case we’ll take another run at it.”
Inrix is among a crop of companies waiting on the IPO sidelines, following a record year for IPOs in 2021.
Shifting focus
Mistele said he was worried about the business when the pandemic hit, given that many Inrix customers are automotive companies and people were driving less frequently. But it also opened up an opportunity as transportation changed so quickly with the pandemic and the rise of remote work.
“There became this big need among federal and state governments to really understand what was happening,” Mistele said. “They are trying to get a handle on what they can do about it.”
The 350-person company in recent years has shifted from selling traffic and transportation-related data to offering software-as-a-service products that feature more analytics, primarily to public sector clients.
“There’s a broad variety of customers that don’t know what to do with the data,” said Mistele. “So we basically built them software solutions.”
Examples include traffic signal timing software products used by government agencies, and a new product built with General Motors focused on road safety.
Mistele said the software-as-a-service side of the business makes up about a third of the company’s revenue.
Inrix still sells data, which comes from more than 650 real-time sources and is anonymized. But it is seeing demand from new places.
For example, it recently launched a product for financial services customers such as hedge funds that are trying to understand the number of vehicles going in and out of a retail establishment so they can get a better idea of a particular company’s growth.
Retailers such as Starbucks and Chick-fil-A also use Inrix to figure out where to open new stores.
“Over time our automotive business will shrink and public sector and enterprise will continue to grow,” Mistele said. “We’ll focus more on analytics and our software-as-a-service solutions, instead of just providing raw data, which was our original bread-and-butter business.”
Inrix has more than 1,200 customers.
Inrix recently laid off less than 10 employees. The cuts were unrelated to the economic outlook, Mistele said. Inrix has more than 10 open positions on its website.
Looking ahead, and reflecting
The rise of autonomous vehicles could be a boon for Inrix in the future given the amount of data self-driving technology requires. But Mistele, a former general manager at Microsoft and engineer at Ford, said the adoption of self-driving has been slower than anticipated and that it could be a decade until mass deployment.
Reflecting on the company’s journey, Mistele said it’s remarkable how much has changed at the intersection of technology and transportation since he helped start Inrix with former Microsoft colleague Craig Chapman.
“There was no iPhone, there was no Tesla, there was no such thing as big data,” Mistele said. “Nobody in Silicon Valley wanted to talk about transportation because it was not an interesting sector of the economy.
“It’s amazing how much that has changed. The whole transportation system has completely changed, which has helped our business along the way.
“I couldn’t be happier with how the company turned out. But every year there’s a new challenge, whether it’s an economic challenge like 2008 and 2009 and 2022, or whether it’s some technological change. But that’s what makes this sector fun: everything’s always changing.”
