Oct. 28—Tooling around in his 2019 Volkswagen Jetta along Main Street, Marcus Newbury filmed the road in front of him and the passenger in his back seat.

An app on his cellphone, secured on his car's dashboard, helped capture the short drive — both with video and data on the car's speed and how hard the vehicle accelerated and braked.

"It charts all your movements," said Newbury, co-founder and chief operating officer of Driver Technologies Inc. "It can replay the trip."

The company — a finalist this month for the New Hampshire Tech Alliance's Product of the Year award — has raised around $10 million in funding.

Not only will it capture the scene around the user but also will issue alerts, such as for an imminent forward collision.

Users who pay $4.99 a month for the premium service launched this year receive extra features, including roadside assistance and the ability to retrieve their trips from the cloud. A free version offers fewer benefits.

The app, which has been downloaded 300,000 times, keeps a screensaver on your phone, so drivers don't get distracted while operating their vehicle.

The company also makes money from sharing its collective anonymous data with about a dozen customers paying between $10,000 and $100,000 a month.

"It all boils down to a better understanding of every aspect of driving you could possibly want to know," said Newbury, 37, who lives in Newmarket.

That's why insurance companies and others take the data and search for specific information to make roads safer or offer new insurance options.

"If they're accessing it from a data perspective, they like to know things like, 'Hey, we're looking to launch a different type of product maybe for a higher risk client like maybe a heavy duty truck or something like that, in this state, so we'd like to see how heavy duty trucks operate in this state. What are those average speeds? What is the declaration as they approach stop signs?'"

John Salvucci with Stable Insurance is a believer.

He likes that video gets stored.

"With Driver Technologies, because they upload it to the cloud, we basically get immediate access to that footage," said Salvucci, whose company only insures ride-share drivers. "There's no time lost. The sooner we can start adjusting the claim the better result we're going to have in the long run.

"That's a huge advantage to us as an insurance company, and we can reward customers with lower premiums if we have better results," Salvucci said.

He offers a 20% discount to drivers using the premium app and 10% to those with a traditional dash cam.

The ability to access footage from months ago is a huge plus, according to Newbury.

"It's extremely common to have issues, especially if you are a ride-share driver to have issues where six months ago, someone complained and you're now hearing about it, and with a traditional dash cam, you might not have a record of that," he said.

Newbury was able to note some trends among New Hampshire motorists.

"From our anonymized safety data we've seen the highest concentration of driving near the major cities in the south of the state, but surprisingly New Hampshire drivers travel incredible distances on single trips as far north as Canada and all the way down to D.C. as well as regular long drives on dark highways all across the state, Vermont and Massachusetts," Newbury said in a later email.

"These long drives represent a lot of risk in terms of distraction, drowsiness and resulting crashes," Newbury said.

But the state's drivers "are pretty good," he said.

"In terms of the real power of our DriverCloud platform, when we study incidents on our road segments we see lower rates of tailgating, red-light-running and high-severity accidents and near accidents than most states," Newbury wrote.

His team determined New Hampshire is the ninth safest state in terms of per-capita road fatalities.

Two friends from Hancock — Marcus Newbury and Rashid Galadanci — developed the Driverapp at a Detroit incubator in 2018.

New Hampshire's four employees mostly handle business development and customer service. The remaining 22 workers are scattered over a half-dozen other states.

"We realized quickly that if you're looking for a talented team, you can't have geographic limits," Newbury said.

The company should be operationally profitable by mid- to late 2023. The company has several investors contributing more than $1 million each, including Liberty Mutual insurance.

If it all sounds too Big Brother, Newbury said don't worry.

"Privacy is huge for us. We are for the driver," he said, adding the company never captures nor sells any personally identifiable information.

"What we do is allow an employee or an employer to have a relationship in which they share information," Newbury said.

"We allow you as a driver the ability to opt in to a program with your insurance carrier where you can share that information for a claims purpose or a discount rate," he said.

Stable Insurance, which has a New York City mailing address but no brick and mortar location, said ride-share drivers, who often deliver people and/or food for several companies, drive on average five times as many miles than a typical driver, according to Salvucci.

That means they are more likely to file an insurance claim "just because of the miles they drive," he said.