Mobile phone use has made driving more dangerous.
Now some former standout engineers at Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) are using mobile phone data to try and make it safer.
What they're finding— by using artificial intelligence to analyze massive amounts of driver information— may radically change how auto insurance is priced.
Tech CEOs often start their companies to eliminate an obstacle they've encountered in their personal lives. Often called 'pain points' in Silicon Valley, two famous ones include Mark Zuckerberg wanting to meet more Harvard coeds and Travis Kalanick waiting too long for a ride.
But when Jonathan Matus reveals why he founded Zendrive, whose software is used to analyze driving behavior, the pain he talks about is more visceral.
"More people die in car accidents than in wars in Israel " said Matus, an Israeli-American, when asked where he got the idea for the company.
When he heard that statistic about his home country, Matus correctly deduced the reason: more drivers distracted by mobile phones.
It's the same in the U.S., where traffic fatalities are now going up after decades of decline. More than 40,000 Americans were killed in car accidents in 2016, a 14 percent rise since 2014, according to the National Safety Council.
That's the biggest two-year surge in five decades.
So Matus, who helped turn Google's Android into the world's dominant mobile software and later led the launch of Facebook's mobile platform, teamed up with another Google engineer, Pankaj Risbood, and in 2013 founded Zendrive.
"We can use smartphone data to save lives," Matus told CNBC in an interview.
A whole lotta data
Matus got his start in the smartphone world at Google in 2007, where he was a marketing manager for Android as it grew from nothing to the most popular mobile platform. Then he moved to Facebook, where he helped launch its mobile platform.
So Matus knows mobile. And when he talks about data, he means a whole lot of it.
As of this week, Zendrive has analyzed 15 billion miles of driving, captured through a variety of applications and hardware that commercial fleet owners use to track driver safety. Zendrive also has partnerships with consumer apps, including Life360 and HopSkipDrive, to collect information about how drivers with those apps are operating.
That 15 billion miles of analysis is more than Uber has, Matus claims, and almost as much as Progressive Insurance, which said last May it hit that same milestone — after nearly two decades of data collection.