Nauto, a Palo Alto company focused on retrofitting existing vehicle fleets with networked safety camera-equipped devices, has raised $159 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank (which has been quite spendy lately). The company’s products focus on gathering data about human drivers and their behavior in order to improve safety practices right now, but their platform also has a second, potentially more lucrative purpose: building a huge data set that can prove very valuable in the development of self-driving cars.
That’s where SoftBank’s interest lies, according to CEO Masayoshi Son, who noted in a statement that “Nauto is generating a highly valuable dataset for autonomous driving, at a massive scale,” in addition to establishing itself as a telematics business that can produce revenue right now, while simultaneously amassing a library of data from a huge cumulative pool of real-world driving…