SambaSafety acquires Vigillo; companies plan to offer ‘single dashboard’ for driver risk management

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Updated Feb 24, 2017
Vigillo has been providing CSA scorecards and data mining products in the transportation industry for nearly a decade.Vigillo has been providing CSA scorecards and data mining products in the transportation industry for nearly a decade.

On Thursday, Feb. 23, SambaSafety announced the acquisition of Vigillo to expand its portfolio of cloud-based driver risk management (DRM) products that include driver MVR and background reports used by fleets.

In April, 2016, SambaSafety was recapitalized by ABRY Partners, a private equity firm with headquarters in Boston, Mass.

The two companies have been talking about the possibility of an acquisition since mid-2012, said Richard Crawford, chief executive officer of SambaSafety during a press conference call on Wednesday, Feb. 22. With funding from ABRY Partners, Crawford said that formal discussions to acquire Vigillo began in April, 2016, and the deal closed on Friday, Feb. 17.

By acquiring Vigillo, a provider of real-time data for analyzing commercial driver and motor carrier safety performance, SambaSafety plans to create a risk identification and mitigation dashboard that combines both MVR and CSA data for fleets.

More specifically, the combination of SambaSafety’s driver risk management solution and Vigillo’s CSA Daylight Suite will combine MVR monitoring with CSA violation and crash monitoring to help customers manage and track the performance of their drivers in all 50 states and identify and mitigate high risk driver behaviors.

“We are focused on the entire lifecycle,” Crawford said, noting that in addition to the pre-hire process where an MVR is required, the companies plan to expand their services for driver qualification (DQ) file management to include drug and alcohol testing.

“We will build a common platform that our partners can plug into to provide single source of truth,” he said. “For DOT-regulated fleets, pre-hire and post-hire driver records can now be synchronized into driver qualification files to ensure that safe, policy-compliant drivers are on the road.”

Vigillo has about 2,000 fleet customers. The combined entity will have 5,000 fleet customers that manage over one million drivers, and “we expect to grow that significantly,” said Steve Bryan, president of Vigillo.

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“I founded Vigillo 10 years ago with the vision to bring world class data analytics to bear on the complex safety data that surrounds the trucking industry.  Our mission and vision was, and remains, to push the boundaries of data analytics to give safety professionals in this vital industry the tools they need to save lives,” said Bryan in a press announcement. “This combination with SambaSafety will only serve to accelerate that mission.”