Tantalum, the leader in connected car software and payments, today announces the sale of Tracker, its UK stolen vehicle recovery business, to CalAmp (NASDAQ: CAMP). The sale follows swiftly on Tantalum’s acquisition of Springworks, the Stockholm-based connected car software house.
The sale of Tracker and Tantalum’s restructuring enables the enlarged group to deliver global connected car software and payments opportunities with its partners, such as its current rollout with AT&T across the US, with Telia in Scandinavia, and with Swisscom and AMAG across Switzerland.
Tantalum is building out the infrastructure to connect vehicles and their users to a global ecosystem. This ‘connectivity to payment’ ecosystem enables the in-car delivery and payment of services, from a network of service providers that can be used by individuals, cities, states, and private actors to access, for example, insurance, roadside assistance, parking, car-pooling and fuelling.
Tantalum CEO, Erik Ramberg said, “Scale is essential to success, not only to this venture, but for the connected car as a whole. By bringing together leading players we have the opportunity to create a trusted neutral platform with our payments engine, Pay.Car, at its heart. Tantalum’s services can be used by everyone across the industry, and across the globe, to create a unique ‘connectivity to payment’ for the future of the connected car.”
Disruptive, Tantalum’s lead investor, is retaining access rights to the low powered wide area network (LPWAN) operated by Tracker, which offers comprehensive 99% coverage of the UK and is already in use to create an “IoT mesh network”.
Tantalum Investor Director, Lincoln Jopp of Disruptive Capital, said, “The sale of Tracker enables Tantalum to concentrate on rolling out world class software and payments via the world’s OEMs and Telcos. The sale made good strategic sense and good business sense. Combined with the sale of the fleet services from Tracker to Movil, it represents a healthy 8.1x return on our original investment from when we acquired Tracker from Direct Line in 2014. Disruptive backs great management and we commend the team at Tracker for transforming it over the past five years.”
