Datakrew's US$2.6M raise is a bet on the EV problem nobody wants to own: battery failures. Datakrew has raised US$2.6 million in a pre-series A round led by Greenwillow Capital Management, with participation from Beenext, 500 Global, SEEDS (now SG Growth Capital), XA Network, AngelList, and other investors. It is not a monster round, and that is precisely the point: the Singapore-based deeptech startup is going after a market where trust is earned slowly, pilots are painful, and a single bad call can turn "AI insights" into a liability. Founded in 2019, Datakrew sells what the EV industry increasingly needs but rarely standardises: battery intelligence for fleets and operators - tools that turn raw telemetry into signals about battery health, degradation, safety risk, and performance. Its core product, OXRED MyFleet, sits in the messy middle between vehicle hardware and business outcomes: fewer breakdowns, fewer roadside incidents, tighter maintenance scheduling, and better decisions on when to rotate, refurbish, or retire packs. The company claims it has "recorded and analysed more than 10,000 battery assets across seven countries" and holds "over 105 million kilometres" of proprietary EV telemetry. Datakrew also says its US-patented OBD-II device, ITUS Max, captures over 120 parameters, while OXRED MyFleet produces over 70 secondary metrics to estimate a battery's future state of health. The new money will fund products including OXRED GuardianAI and OXRED InsurShield, plus hires across sales and battery machine learning as it pushes into Europe and the Americas. What this funding means for Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia's EV story is often told through passenger cars and consumer adoption. Datakrew's pitch is more industrial: the region's near-term value is in commercial fleets - delivery vans, ride-hailing vehicles, buses, and two- and three-wheelers - where utilisation is high, and downtime is expensive. That creates a natural opening for predictive battery maintenance, even if the market is still early. The region is fragmented across vehicle types, standards, climates, and charging behaviours. Heat, humidity, stop-start driving, inconsistent charging infrastructure, and uneven maintenance practices all accelerate degradation or, at a minimum, make it harder to predict. In other words: Southeast Asia is a harsh classroom for battery models - and a lucrative one if you can make them work. How big is the market? Hard numbers for "predictive battery maintenance" in Southeast Asia are scarce because spending is split across software subscriptions, telematics contracts, OEM warranties, workshop services, and insurance. A practical way to size it is as a serviceable market tied to commercial EV fleets: even modest per-vehicle annual spending on monitoring and diagnostics becomes meaningful once fleets scale, because batteries are the dominant cost centre and failures ripple through operations. As fleets expand across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, the addressable spend on battery analytics and risk tools plausibly moves into the hundreds of millions of US dollars annually over the next few years, with upside as electrification shifts from pilots to full fleet refresh cycles. What drives growth in Southeast Asia. * Fleet economics: Operators can tolerate many things; they cannot tolerate unpredictable downtime. * Financing and leasing: Lenders and lessors want better visibility into residual value and pack health. * Insurance pressure: Higher repair costs and battery-related incidents push insurers towards telemetry-backed pricing. * Regulatory direction: Safety expectations are rising, even if rules differ widely across countries. * Second-life and resale: Better health data makes batteries easier to re-trade, repurpose, or warrant. The catch: Southeast Asia is also where analytics vendors can die by a thousand integrations. Data access is inconsistent, OEMs guard diagnostic channels, and fleets run mixed vehicle brands. Any platform promising cross-fleet battery truth needs to survive the real world of missing signals, messy retrofits, and workshops that do not want more dashboards. The market is likely to move through three phases: * Visibility (now): Basic health scoring, alerts, and anomaly detection - useful, but often descriptive rather than predictive. * Decision support (next): Maintenance scheduling, charging policy optimisation, and pack rotation recommendations that are directly tied to cost and uptime. * Risk and finance plumbing (later): Battery passports, warranty arbitration support, and insurance-linked products where analytics becomes part of contracts, not just operations. Datakrew's roadmap hints at that direction, especially with products framed around guardrails and insurance rather than only fleet dashboards. If battery analytics becomes embedded into underwriting, leasing, and warranty workflows, vendors gain stickier revenue and clearer ROI. They also inherit sharper accountability: if the model misses a failure, someone pays. The US and Europe: bigger markets, tougher rules, stronger incumbents. Datakrew says it will expand into Europe and the Americas. The opportunity is straightforward: more EVs, bigger fleets, higher labour costs, and stricter compliance expectations - conditions that make predictive maintenance economically attractive. Europe is heading towards deeper battery traceability and standardisation, including initiatives often described as a "battery passport" direction of travel. That increases demand for structured data, consistent diagnostics, and auditable health metrics across a battery's life. The US is a fleet-first electrification story in many segments - delivery, municipal vehicles, logistics - where operational uptime and total cost of ownership dominate purchasing decisions. But the competitive reality is harsher. In mature markets, Datakrew competes not only with startups but also with: * OEM platforms that already sit on privileged data. * Tier-1 suppliers and diagnostics giants that can bundle analytics with hardware. * Fleet telematics incumbents expanding into EV-specific insights. In the US and Europe, the prize is large - arguably multi-billion-dollar over time when you include adjacent spend across telematics, diagnostics, warranty analytics, and insurance - but the bar is higher: security reviews, procurement bureaucracy, and legal exposure around safety claims. Who else is fighting for this territory. Globally, the competitive set spans EV battery analytics specialists, broader telematics players, and OEM-adjacent platforms. Notable names include: * Battery analytics specialists (global): TWAICE, ACCURE Battery Intelligence, Volytica Diagnostics, Qnovo, Eatron * Fleet telematics expanding into EV insights (global): Geotab, Samsara * OEMs and cell makers (global, indirectly competing): OEM-native diagnostics stacks and battery makers offering embedded monitoring and lifecycle services In Southeast Asia, the picture is thinner: many fleets still rely on OEM dashboards and general-purpose telematics, while local integrators stitch together monitoring on a per-fleet basis. That gap is the opening Datakrew is trying to exploit - but it is also why credibility matters more than branding. Battery health is not a "move fast" domain. It is a "be right, then scale" domain. US$2.6 million will not buy domination. What it can buy is time: to prove models under Southeast Asia's messy operating conditions, to land reference fleets, and to walk into Europe and the US with evidence rather than ambition. 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SG deeptech startup Datakrew nets $2.6m pre-series A. Datakrew, a Singapore-based deep-tech company that provides EV battery analytics, raised US$2.6 million in a pre-series A round led by Greenwillow Capital Management to scale its OXRED MyFleet platform and expand across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The funding round included Beenext, 500 Global, SEEDS (now SG Growth Capital), XA Network, AngelList, and other investors. The company said it has recorded and analyzed more than 10,000 battery assets across seven countries and holds over 105 million kilometres of proprietary EV telemetry. Datakrew said its US-patented OBD-II device ITUS Max captures over 120 parameters and that OXRED MyFleet outputs over 70 secondary metrics used to estimate future battery state of health. The proceeds will fund products including OXRED GuardianAI and OXRED InsurShield, plus hires for sales and battery ML expertise as it expands in European and American markets. Food for thought. Implications, context, and why it matters. The technology tackles expensive fleet headaches. * Datakrew's OXRED MyFleet platform aims to reduce EV fleet disruptions such as sudden downtime and shrinking range that can cut into rides 1. * It pairs a US-patented on-board diagnostics (OBD-II) device called ITUS Max with OXRED analytics software, turning vehicle signals into practical guidance for fleet managers 2. * The company says the system can pay back by extending vehicle lifespan by 20%, improving battery safety by 50%, and lifting asset resale value by 10% using AI-based alerts, warnings, and recommendations 3. * It also supports mixed fleets across many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including Tesla, BYD, and Mercedes Benz 4. The EV business is moving toward lifecycle management. * Datakrew says OEMs are shifting from selling vehicles to running the vehicle lifecycle, driven by connectivity and data-based services 2. * It pitches a ready-to-use connectivity and analytics stack so OEMs can join a connected-vehicle ecosystem without building everything in-house, including predictive maintenance 2. * EV telemetry can also support revenue ideas beyond daily fleet work. * Datakrew says timely AI optimization can raise resale value, and it sells OXRED AutoCert, which uses vehicle and battery data in resale-related workflows 3. How would you feel if you could no longer use Tech in Asia? Share, tag us, and land on our Wall of!