A Chat with Dom Saunders, CEO at Driver Safety & Sustainability Platform: Brightmile

At Brightmile, our mission is to make work-related driving safer, cheaper, and greener. Our solution is built on an app that can be downloaded to any smartphone or tablet in the world to immediately understand and gamify improvements in driving behaviour.

We are focused on business driving, so we also give our customer managers a portal setting out fleet level safety trends and areas for improvement, and our Customer Success team run a hands-on program to ensure that we are delivering value.

Brightmile started off primarily as a health & safety tool and we were encouraged by early case studies demonstrating collision reductions among our drivers. It was only later as part of a pilot assessment with a large North American telecoms provider that we measured a fuel efficiency improvement of 15% and realised that we could help companies move the needle from a sustainability perspective as well.

We have now been operating for over 4 years and are working with some household names in over 100 countries.
 
 

 

What made you decide to start Brightmile?

 
Whilst working as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Kamet Ventures where I was fortunate to be involved with identifying and launching a number of disruptive insurtech startups. Brightmile jumped out primarily due to the scale of the global problem that we are looking to solve – there are 20 million peopled injured or disabled by work-related driving collisions each year, whilst driving is also the largest single contributor to many companies’ carbon footprint.

I did not, however, have a background in the industry, so I was fortunate at around the same time to meet Mark Watts, my first Co-Founder, who was Product Director at one of the major incumbents in the telematics space and validated the desk-based research we had been doing by jumping onboard!
 

What can we hope to see from Brightmile in the future?

 
Having built a solid platform, we now look to expand in all directions. From a product perspective, this means branching out from our current focus on driver behaviour into adjacencies – such as vehicle checks, lone worker features, mileage expense reimbursement, and electrification – to ultimately become a one-stop shop for business driving software.

We aim to go deeper with our enterprise partnerships to cement Brightmile into their operations – one example of this is using our platform to quantify and report on CO2 emission reductions for Board and investor level sustainability metrics.

We will also grow our presence in emerging markets where unfortunately road death statistics are the most tragic and Brightmile has a strong fit for motorcycle drivers.
 

Why do you think the business driver safety market needs to be disrupted?

 
Early on in our research, we learned that corporate health and safety officers were faced with a blindspot when it came to driving risk. You would never see an employee without a hard hat in a factory or on a site, yet companies can have thousands of employees driving 20,000 miles per year for work and no visibility on the level of risk they are taking on the road, even though the business vehicle is an extension of the office and companies have a duty of care for the work space.

This is the situation faced by companies due to the bad fit for traditional hardware telematics outside of the domain of heavy trucks and professional drivers – leaving large gaps when it comes to lighter commercial vehicles, company cars, two-wheelers, and grey fleet.

The market also had a reputation for the “stick” not the “carrot” – Brightmile aims to reverse this by engaging drivers and rewarding safe driving to create the look and feel of a modern personal fitness app not a corporate tracking device.