Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri — in his first major announcement after becoming the chief of the telecom networks, location services and technologies company – today announced a $100 million Connected Car Fund.

When Nokia announced the elevation of the Indian born Suri as the new CEO, the company said it would focus on innovation to bring new technologies.

The Connected Car fund will be the fourth fund that Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) has managed on behalf of Nokia over the past decade.

The fund will invest in auto tech and local services companies in collaboration with HERE, a Nokia company, to grow the ecosystem around HERE’s mapping and location products and services.

Recently, ABI Research said the number of subscribers to OEM telematics services is set for solid growth in Western Europe at a CAGR of 47 percent, reaching 42.5 million in 2019.

“A slew of new electrical vehicles from VW, Tesla, BMW, Daimler, and others will also boost telematics uptake and awareness,” said ABI Research VP and practice director Dominique Bonte, recently.

Nokia is a major player in the automotive industry providing location intelligence for connected vehicles through HERE.

Rajeev Suri, Nokia President and CEO, said: “Our new USD 100 million venture fund launched today further underlines our belief that the connected car is a significant growth opportunity where NGP is poised to make great investments.”

The Connected Car fund extends NGP’s investment activities in the U.S., India, China and Europe where Nokia Growth Partners continue to invest in high potential businesses.

The new fund brings Nokia’s commitments managed by NGP to $700 million. NGP has invested in firms such as Rocket Fuel, Heptagon and UCweb.

Michael Halbherr, CEO of HERE, said: “Connected cars equipped with precise location awareness and sensor data can become powerful devices capable of helping drivers make sense of the world around them.”

“M2M continues to gather momentum as enterprises, in the never-ending pursuit of competitive advantage, seek to find new ways of using connected technologies to improve business agility and lower operational costs,” said Godfrey Chua, directing analyst for M2M and The Internet of Things at Infonetics Research.

For telecom service providers, there are significant opportunities ahead. Cellular technologies are playing an increasingly important role in enabling M2M services, comprising the vast majority of WAN wireless M2M connections today, over 220 million, and nearly tripling to just over 630 million connections by 2018.

The global market for M2M services reached just over $16 billion in 2013, and there were nearly 1.7 billion M2M connections worldwide. Nearly 80 percent of M2M devices in 2013 were connected via personal area network (PAN) technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.

Baburajan K
[email protected]