Driven

Brad Cordova had deeply personal reasons to start a company to combat distracted driving and tap into the new market for data-driven insurance.

- Susan Adams

In early 2014, Progressive insurance held a contest to choose the best cellphone app to play Big Brother to its policyholders. The nation’s fourth-largest auto insurer wanted to track drivers’ mileage, time of day on the road and whether they were slamming on the brakes. Eleven companies entered. One was TrueMotion, a Boston-based startup co-founded by Brad Cordova, now 27, an MIT graduate school dropout who had taught himself to code at age 7. He had $3 million in seed funding but no paying customers.

Before the contest kicked off, Cordova thought his team had perfected their app—only to realise it was draining too much battery power, which meant they had to re-engineer it. “It was like climbing a mountain with a gun to your head,” he says. They worked 18-hour days feeding data into machine-learning algorithms, then testing multiple versions on thousands of drivers they recruited through Applause, a Boston user-testing outfit. That September, Cordova learned that TrueMotion was one of three finalists, but Progressive wanted refinements, like tracking if users were texting while driving.

Cordova’s 10-person team got little sleep for the next four months. In April 2015, TrueMotion triumphed, signing an eight-figure deal with Progressive that has helped it land eight new customers and another $10 million in venture funding. Forbes estimates TrueMotion’s 2017 revenue will exceed $15 million.