Immigrant Hari Balakrishnan Has Made Roads Safer For Drivers

Hari Balakrishnan, born in India, decided to attend a university in the United States for one reason: “Because America was then and remains the best higher education and research ecosystem with the best opportunities in the world,” he said. “And if you want to be the best you can be, you have to go to the place where the opportunities are the best.” Balakrishnan also cofounded one of the best and most innovative companies in the unique field of telematics—Cambridge Mobile Telematics, whose technology has made roads safer for drivers in America and around the world.

In 1993, Hari Balakrishnan graduated with a computer science and engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. He came to America to pursue a Ph.D. “I didn’t consider going anywhere else,” Balakrishnan said in an interview. “There was only one place to go.” He said since World War II, the U.S. university system and research community connected to it have been the best in the world for innovation, opportunity and diversity of people.

Balakrishnan earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. However, he needed to adjust to life in America.

“I came from India in the early 1990s,” he said. “When I left India, a lot of the economy was based on central planning. The joke I used to make is that in India, you have two kinds of bread and 200 political parties. And in America, you have two political parties and 200 kinds of bread.”

He found differences at places other than U.S. grocery stores. “I experienced the incredible diversity of people from many different backgrounds. During the first week of graduate school, I probably ran into people from 30 different countries. That’s just extraordinary. I don’t think any other country in the world is like that. It’s one of America’s greatest strengths.”

After completing his Ph.D., Balakrishnan moved to Boston to become a professor at MIT, where he continues to teach. He calls teaching students “the best job in the world.” While at MIT, he performed research that eventually resulted in a billion-dollar company.

“Entering the United States as an international student has shown to be a promising avenue for immigrants to start successful U.S. companies,” concludes a report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). “One-quarter (143 of 582, or 25%) of billion-dollar startup companies in the U.S. have a founder who first came to America as an international student.”

Approximately five years after becoming a professor, Balakrishnan and Sam Madden, an MIT colleague, developed a driving-focused academic project. “We could instrument moving vehicles with sensors and use that to understand transportation, road patterns and dangers on the roads,” said Balakrishnan.

The project ran from 2000 to 2010, and received academic awards and positive press in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Among the outcomes was a “pothole patrol” that produced daily maps of bad roads. They decided there might be commercial applications.

In 2010, Balakrishnan (Chairman and CTO), Madden (chief scientist) and Bill Powers (CEO) founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics. The company’s website describes what it does: “The company’s AI-driven platform, DriveWell™, gathers sensor data from millions of IoT [internet of things] devices—including smartphones, proprietary Tags, connected vehicles, dashcams, and third-party devices—and fuses them together with contextual data to create a unified view of vehicle and driver behavior.”

The company’s products measure how well people drive, notes Balakrishnan, which makes driving safer by providing feedback and incentives, such as rewards and insurance discounts. “That improves driving quality and makes our roads safer,” he said.

Customers include 21 of the top 25 auto insurers in America. The company also has major customers in 18 countries. Cambridge Mobile Telematics has 401 employees and is valued at $1.5 billion.

Although the company has raised a significant amount of investment, it started out by generating revenue from customers. Cambridge Mobile Telematics began as a pilot program with one insurance company to demonstrate it could provide useful data in a cost-effective way.

Balakrishnan, Powers and Madden faced a significant challenge in launching their company in the middle of a recession. “There was nothing easy about it,” said Powers in an interview. “Many of us didn’t work for salaries for a long time.”

Balakrishnan believes their company will play a central role in the future of mobility. “It could be everything involving powering connected vehicles that have different data sources, whether it’s a phone or something built into the vehicle,” he said. “If you think of the connected car industry as an example, how is the U.S. (or the world) going to fix an antiquated, local and state and federal infrastructure to accommodate intelligent transportation? The problem is not the vehicle. The vehicles are very intelligent and capable. Somebody has to make sense of all the disparate, noisy data to create fields, to create an agnostic evaluation of data, to help us build the evolving future of mobility.”

In business, diversity is a strength, notes Bill Powers, because people from different backgrounds offer unique attributes and perspectives. “You need to embrace your differences and learn in areas where you can improve,” said Powers. “I need to give credit to Hari because he did not have a lot of sales experience. And now he is one of our top sales guys because he has intellectual curiosity. I did not have a lot of technology experience, but I learned, not to the level of a professor, but enough to know why things are relevant. True partnerships come from humility, understanding, friendship, collaboration and respect for one another.”

Powers and Balakrishnan agree that America gains by welcoming immigrants.

“Immigration and immigrants make the United States stronger,” said Balakrishnan. “It’s the only country in the world where somebody like me coming from somewhere with a different background and an accent, somebody looks at me on the street and they ask me for directions. They assume I belong here. It’s such a rare thing. You go to any other country in the world, and if you don’t look like the other people, everybody thinks you’re a foreigner. In the U.S., we don’t think that way. Immigration is the biggest strength that we have. We need to be able to attract and retain talent, no matter where people come from.”

Hari Balakrishnan reflects on his decision to leave India, attend a U.S. university as an international student and become a professor and entrepreneur. “People coming from all over the world to become Americans makes America even stronger,” he said. “There are very few countries where people will come based on faith and trust in the system. A trust that no one cares where you come from, that you will have an opportunity. It’s just such an amazing place to be. I hope it remains that way.”