Bliq secured a $13.5 million Series A round led by NEA.

Bliq, a Berlin, Germany-based startup building a business based on a mobile app for helping self-employed drivers, raised series A round closed at $13.5 million.

The money was raised from investors led by NEA, joined by Speedinvest, Proeza Ventures, Revel and and angel investor Andreas Kupke.

The proceeds will be used to grow Bliq’s userbase of drivers across Europe and expand furthermore to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Bliq, founded in 2018 by Julian Glaab, Torgen Hauschild and Johannes Riedel, developed a mobile app aiming to find jobs for drivers, by leveraging real-time data streams from millions of connected vehicles and computer vision on the Edge to build a street-level sensor network. The company’s business model is based on the growing alternative transport industry, where providers such as Uber, Free Now, and Bolt place orders with independent drivers.

The service onboarded 13,000 registered drivers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Portugal, and Romania, and offers services that include side-by-side jobs comparisons, trending locations via surge maps that use extensive real-time data map data based on driver activity, and driver to driver chat functionality.

Bliq previously raised €2M ($2.4M) from investors led by Amplifier Ventures and New York-based Space Capital. Other investors contributing were Atlantic Labs, which backed the company in 2019.