KPMG Australia has made another investment in NSW-based Nuonic – whose primary product is the transport analytics platform Prism – taking its total investment in the startup to $1.3 million.

Prism processes and analyses data from IoT devices on vehicles to help organisations manage their commercial vehicle fleets.

KPMG says it will also exclusively offer its clients access to Prism, with an initial focus on automating the calculation and processing of Fuel Tax Credits (FTC), to provide “sophisticated commercial insights” for vehicle fleet operators.

There are more than 3.7 million commercial vehicles in Australia and over 50,000 businesses claim FTC refunds each year, according to KPMG.

KPMG Australia CEO Gary Wingrove said KPMG’s relationship with Nuonic would enable KPMG to grow its Fuel Tax Credits business and extend into future applications such as business intelligence for road usage, cities and infrastructure. “We see a lot of potential in Nuonic,” he said.

Other Nuonic investors include founders Sebastian Jezierski and Derek Hooper and fintech firm InLoop, which is backed by Macquarie Capital and Westpac.

Nuonic, based in Kingscliff on the NSW North Coast, says it will use this latest investment to expand its development teams in northern NSW and Brisbane, and accelerate new product development.

Nuonic CEO Sebastian Jezierski described KPMG’s involvement as a watershed moment in Nuonic’s growth, saying that, since its launch in January 2017, Prism had already processed over 500 million data points for major clients in the resources, transport and utilities sectors. According to its web site almost 2000 vehicles it is gathering data from almost 2000 vehicles.

“The demand for Prism has demonstrated the massive market for this tech, with customers using it to make transformational changes to fleet management,” Jezierski said.

“Beyond KPMG’s financial commitment, our strategic alliance will help us fully explore the possibilities of this breakthrough analytics technology, develop new tools and expand our customer base.”

According to Jezierski, the global opportunities for analytics technology in the transport sector are huge.

“Just last month Ford announced its intention to develop a Transportation Mobility Cloud – an open communications platform to manage everything from parking spaces to traffic lights,” he said.

“This demonstrates the increasing global need for tech-agnostic analytics platforms to manage massive amounts of data, which is why scalable solutions like Prism will play an essential role in helping businesses to navigate the future.”