Intelligent transportation connectivity provider Excelfore Corp. has received investments from investment company Molex Ventures LLC and automotive lighting developer HELLA.

This is the first time that HELLA, through its HELLA Ventures venture capital arm, has invested in Excelfore, following a previously announced collaboration on bidirectional over-the-air software updating and data gathering for automotive components. Molex also invested in the Excelfore Series A round of funding.

Excelfore is focused on smart mobility with middleware for in-vehicle and vehicle-to-cloud networks, which is embedded into leading products such as the Molex automotive network platform. Excelfore’s software enables automotive OEMs and manufacturers to build the next generation of connected cars. Its eSync over-the-air system helps automakers address increasingly expensive and inconvenient vehicle recalls, creating a two-way pipeline for updating software and gathering data from the increasing number of electronic components in modern cars.

HELLA has recently demonstrated using eSync to provide features-on-demand, providing car owners, for example, the ability to choose new advanced lighting features to be installed on their vehicles on a trial or permanent basis.

“Molex views embedded middleware from Excelfore as a key part of a fully integrated platform, providing industry standards-based, scalable, and agile networks in the vehicle and beyond to the cloud,” said Lily Yeung, vice president of Molex Ventures. “We look forward to the continued collaboration with Excelfore for in-vehicle networking and cloud connectivity.”