A look at Otonomo and Wejo, two struggling startups working to monetize connected car data; Otonomo to merge with roadside assistance tech provider Urgently
Auto companies promising billions in new software revenue by the end of the decade have been hiring engineers left and right …
Context & Ripple Effects
Six years after its $25M Series B made Otonomo the poster child for selling automakers' connected-car data, the model has hit a wall: Bloomberg reports both Otonomo and Wejo are struggling to monetize, and Otonomo is now folding itself into Urgently, a roadside-assistance tech provider. The pivot follows Wejo's 2021 route to market — a SPAC merger raising $330M at an $800M valuation including debt — which priced both firms on the same promise of vehicle-data revenue.
The backdrop is automakers' own software ambitions: coverage going back to 2018 has tracked traditional OEMs repositioning as software-and-service companies against Uber and Waymo, and the description notes OEMs still project billions in software revenue by decade's end while hiring engineers aggressively. What changed is who captures the data value — intermediaries like Otonomo raised a $46M Series C to sit between cars and buyers, but the struggling pair suggests OEMs aren't ceding that layer.
First-order effects
- Otonomo's standalone data-monetization business effectively ends: the Urgently merger shifts its center of gravity from selling vehicle data to roadside-assistance services built on connectivity.
- Wejo, now the remaining public pure-play from the 2021 SPAC cohort, loses its closest comparable and inherits the burden of proving vehicle-data economics alone.
Second-order effects
- Automakers evaluating data partners get a cautionary data point: if funded specialists can't make resale work, OEMs face more pressure to build data products in-house or bundle them into consumer-facing services they own.
- Roadside assistance emerges as the anchor use case that actually pays — pushing other connected-car data startups toward service bundles rather than raw data licensing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the connected-car data middleman layer consolidates or disappears, with value migrating to whoever owns the customer relationship — the OEM or the service provider — rather than the aggregator.
- The unwind of SPAC-era valuations in this sector would force later entrants to raise against proven per-service unit economics instead of projected data volumes.
The trend: Connected-car data startups are consolidating away from raw data resale toward bundled consumer services, as automakers keep the data-value chain closer to home.