With electric vehicles slowly gaining momentum toward becoming the dominant form of transportation in the U.S., two startups have struck up a partnership to help cities and utilities figure out where to put more car chargers. StreetLight Data, which sells transportation data to local governments, will offer Volta Charging's PredictEV tool to its customers. The tool uses AI to generate suggestions about where electric charging infrastructure would be most useful -- an urban planning consideration that is becoming more important as more electric vehicles hit the streets. Today, electric vehicles make up only around 2 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S., but that number is rising rapidly. In 2020, Pew Research found that the number of EVs sold in the country had more than tripled since 2016.

StreetLight Data, a big data platform that helps cities unlock mobility insights from location data from smartphone apps, has raised $15 million in a series D round of funding. The raise comes as cities around the world are having to adapt to social distancing measures that require shifts in transportation -- bikes over buses, for example. Founded in 2012, San Francisco-based StreetLight Data works with an aggregator called Cuebiq, which collects anonymized location data from hundreds of apps, including weather and dating apps, installed on millions of smartphones in North America. Cuebiq packages this inside an SDK that can be used by third-party platforms to create new apps and services. StreetLight Data applies its machine learning algorithms to this data to figure out things like how people travel through cities, what transportation they use, and which times and days are busiest.

The mobility revolution may have the potential to transform cities, but in the short term the rise in ride-hailing apps, bike sharing, and electric scooters is giving many local officials fits. A healthy dose of data and machine learning may help get this movement back on track. That's the bet that San Francisco-based StreetLight Data is making. The company is helping cities harness the explosion of data being generated by everything from smart city sensors to mobile phones to new transportation modes, in a bid to reinvent urban planning. As cities groan under rising populations and pollution, making more effective use of data could be the key to making them habitable over the long run.

The mobility revolution may have the potential to transform cities, but in the short term the rise in ride-hailing apps, bike sharing, and electric scooters is giving many local officials fits. A healthy dose of data and machine learning may help get this movement back on track. That's the bet that San Francisco-based StreetLight Data is making. The company is helping cities harness the explosion of data being generated by everything from smart city sensors to mobile phones to new transportation modes, in a bid to reinvent urban planning. As cities groan under rising populations and pollution, making more effective use of data could be the key to making them habitable over the long run.