Nouvola

Dec 8, 2016

Portland startup Nouvola the latest to crash the connected car rush Dec 8, 2016, 3:40pm PST Industries & Tags Malia Spencer Staff ReporterPortland Business Journal Share Malia Spencer Staff ReporterPortland Business Journal Business Pulse Paola Moretto, founder and CEO of Nouvola, which has landed in the Jaguar Land Rover… more Cathy Cheney | Portland Business Journal In the roughly two years since Nouvola won angel investment conferences up and down Oregon, the team has been busy building its performance testing platform and landing hundreds of business customers. Now the startup has landed in a high profile Portland incubator as it eyes a new market: the connected car. Paola Moretto, founder and CEO of Nouvola, which has landed in the Jaguar Land Rover… more Cathy Cheney | Portland Business Journal The seven-member Nouvola team has moved into the Jaguar Land Rover incubator in Northwest Portland as part of the automaker’s latest cohort of companies. As part of the incubator, the company will have access to JLR’s team of software developers and designers, as well as access to JLR’s broader network within the automotive industry. Want more Portland tech news? Sign up for TechFlash The startup also snags investment and office space . The program offers up to $250,000 in investment and services. For Nouvola, the connected car is a natural next market. Customers use the company’s platform to test performance of web and mobile apps prior to large-scale deployment. If a change is made to a website or app and it causes a failure in speed or performance once it's deployed on a large scale, that can be a problem for businesses. Nouvola is designed to give customers the visibility they need on what will happen when an update is launched. “Similar concepts apply with connected cars,” said co-founder and CEO Paola Moretto . “In the connected car you have apps. Some are launched by the car and some are launched by the user. They communicate to a cloud-based back-end. The way to scale and get to the point where you have 250 million connected cars and each car generates 4,000 gigabytes of data — that will only happen if you have very solid software that is robust enough and scalable enough to sustain that level of traffic.” And where a performance issue for an e-commerce website might mean a customer can’t make an online shoe purchase, a performance problem on the automotive side can be catastrophic. The primary advantage to joining the JLR incubator is the access to the automaker’s network of engineers and executives. “We have an accelerated crash course in connected car,” Moretto said. “We are getting fast feedback on the platform, and that is a way to go after this segment and accelerate our entrance.” Nouvola has mostly boostrapped its growth so far. It raised a $1.2 million seed round early on and expects to close on another $500,000 before the end of the year. The company’s existing customers include Fortune 1000 firms as well as small and mid-sized companies across a range of markets. This quarter, the company saw added validation in its market when its primary competitor, BlazeMeter, was acquired, reportedly for $100 million, by CA Technologies. “It was exciting to see that happen,” Moretto said. “It brought a lot of attention to the category and we were featured in some analyst reports.” The connected car is a hot space right now as automakers and tech companies alike work on autonomous projects and beef up the experience inside the vehicle — an element called infotainment. The JLR incubator was created to help the British automaker connect with startups and new technology that could eventually end up in vehicles. The program has included an array of technology from wearables to drones to software for service centers. Chip giant Intel is also focused on the connected car and has even created a new business unit to tackle this new market. The company sees vehicles as yet another "thing" that makes up the Internet of Things. CEO Brian Krzanich gave a keynote at the LA Autoshow this year where he highlighted the vast scale of the data coming off of a connected car. The company has also partnered with BMW and software maker Mobileye on a program to get fully autonomous vehicles on the road. Malia covers technology, startups and entrepreneurs. Sign up for her free, twice-weekly newsletter , TechFlash. Business Pulse