Announcing NextBillion.ai’s $6.25M Series A Extension

The future of geospatial data starts here

Dropping big news! I am beyond elated to announce that NextBillion.ai has received $6.25 million in investment from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The Series A extension comes less than a year after closing a $7 million funding round from Lightspeed and Falcon Edge Capital in June 2020.

We are holding off celebrations in the wake of the second wave of the pandemic, and we stand united with India in its fight against this crisis. But I didn’t want to hold off announcing this positive news and sharing our journey with everyone.

Who We Are

Since February 2020, we at NextBillion.ai have been helping large enterprises build, scale and manage their own mapping ecosystem. We have scaled to supporting 15 customers across 20 countries, helped enterprises map over 2.5M miles of roads and handled 20B+ API calls in a very short span of time.

We achieved this feat by fundamentally redefining the whole geospatial data space with our unique platform offerings — right from custom map creation, AI-powered spatial data management, enterprise-grade software to customizable mapping tools.

Reimagining Geospatial Data Ecosystem

I built NextBillion.ai with my co-founders Gaurav Bubna and Shaolin Zheng to meet the need for a decentralized spatial data management platform.

In our prior roles at deep tech companies, we realized that enterprises were unaware that map data can be customized to any use-cases, at any scale. Even if they did, they lacked technological capacity and know-how.

In the pre-NextBillion.ai enterprise spatial data space:

• Map making was considered as a boring, survey-driven, people-intensive, high-touch and expensive process.
• Traditional players like Google Maps had a monopoly over the mapping industry because capturing, and maintaining accurate map data was very expensive and they had a monopoly on user data through Android and a B2C consumer application.
• APIs were a black box — complex, mysterious, super expensive and rigid with no configuration options.
• Map Data Management as a Service (MDaaS) and Location Platform as a Service (LPaaS) were never defined.
• On premise deployments, multi-tenant cloud models and having your own maps seemed like an inconceivable task to pull off at a large scale.

NextBillion.ai challenged and changed all of these assumptions and the status quo.

Maps and location intelligence sits at the core of every industry’s growth and development. But existing one-map-fits-all solutions offered by the likes of Google Maps, TomTom, HERE Technologies and Mapbox are inflexible, uninventive, cost-prohibitive and complicated. Their solutions are not built for enterprises, nor can they support the needs of scaling global enterprises.

Sensing the need for innovation, we decided to step into the huge unexplored space of the enterprise spatial data industry. NextBillion.ai led and continues to lead the disruption of the geospatial data ecosystem with our platform, solutions, team and customers.

Building a Scalable and Reliable Platform

At NextBillion.ai, we enrich and customize data with third party open data sources (e.g., street and aerial imagery, data shared by governments) and each customers’ proprietary user data (e.g., GPS, imagery). We simplify and optimize the data in a cost-effective manner to build high performance algorithms and machine learning modules that produce best-in-class APIs and SDKs.

In addition, we also offer a suite of APIs (e.g., distance matrix, navigation, snap-to-road, geocoding, search), SDKs (e.g., maps and navigation), and data tools (e.g., map building, AI labeling, road restrictions) so that enterprises can become self-reliant and build custom maps/applications to meet their specific needs.

Here’s a quick recap of our journey so far with major milestones:

• Went live with our first APIs — Distance Matrix and Directions — in March 2020
• Successfully transitioned our enterprise software company to long-term remote setting — customers and employees
• Created two completely new markets — Map Data Management as a Service (MDaaS) and Location Platform as a Service (LPaaS)
• Raised a cumulative $13.25M Series A in 14 months
• Tested our enterprise-grade mapping solutions and location data management platform in the US, Europe and APAC
• Worked with global category leaders in e-commerce, logistics, food delivery and grocery
• Scaled up from a team of 3 to a strong team of 50+ spread across the globe, in countries like Singapore, China, India and the US
• Bagged three industry awards: Winner of Startup Singapore Slingshot 2020, SG:D Techblazer Silver Winner and #5 on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2021

The Next Phase of Growth With M12

We hold a strong position in the spatial data SaaS space after a solid Series A funding round and rapid growth in the last 14 months. Gaurav, Shaolin and I had no immediate plans to raise funds because of the positive revenue growth. But after generating significant investor interest from top VCs, we decided to look at partners that could help us further to revolutionize the 50-year-old industry, which is long overdue for disruption.

We found what we were looking for in the M12 team. The venture fund company has stayed on top of everything around the spatial data industry — the power of proprietary location data, enterprise-specific needs, the existing status quo, limitations and industry trends.

M12 chose to invest in us because what we do at NextBillion.ai has never been attempted before. We have built proprietary tech and large-scale engineering systems that can conflate, merge and auto QA any scale of map data. Our unique ability to combine open-source solutions’ customizability, ease and low cost with proprietary solutions’ high degree of performance and quality sets us apart from the competition.

With our new partnership with Azure and M12, we are ready to redefine the global spatial space — coast to coast. Our ambitious plans include using our technical expertise and our investors’ guidance to enable a range of innovative use-cases for unserved demands. I have listed a few of the use-cases that would help you understand how our problem-solving mindset works and what we plan to achieve at NextBillion.ai:

• Build bike-specific lanes in cities just for food delivery as a custom layer
• Trucking routes with road and time restrictions for cross country travel
• Pedestrian, wheel-chair and disabled mapping, combined with existing road network
• Emergency response layers dedicated to ambulance routing, dispatch and allocation

The Road Ahead

Historically, location-centric enterprises in need of maps had only four options across the globe to choose from — Google and Mapbox for APIs, and HERE and TomTom for map data. You would find hyperlocal players with data in most of the large countries but there isn’t one unified platform for world scale map data and APIs.

Google is consumer-centric and their map data strategy has always been — collect, license, buy and centralize data. This approach might work for consumer solutions but it can’t serve the needs of enterprises.

Mapbox is a heavily developer-focused platform. HERE and TomTom, on the other end, have slacked off on maintaining data freshness across the world and offer fresh data only in selected countries. And when it comes to maps, the guiding principle is — ‘a map becomes stale the minute you build it.’

It is easy to create maps, but remarkably difficult to maintain them at scale. For this reason, the NextBillion.ai team has always been an advocate for decentralized location tech and data.

There’s no need for an enterprise in Indonesia that delivers food to be worried about an enterprise in India delivering packages. These companies shouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars to help large companies maintain maps. Most tech companies generate substantial amounts of proprietary data that can be used to build their in-house, customized and owned maps stack with the assistance of NextBillion.ai.

Our aim is to build a self-sustaining location ecosystem for every enterprise. This is also the story behind our name NextBillion.ai — enabling a billion different maps for millions of enterprises.

With M12, we not only have a reliable and knowledgeable global partner but also a mentor who has tackled these same problems upfront for decades. The need for a decentralized spatial data platform is now and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of this seismic shift.

In the last 14 months, we have put our heads down to serve some of the largest and most sophisticated customers across the world. We are live in every continent and have mapped over 2.5M miles of roads, managed more than 1.4M restrictions and handled over 20B API calls. And we are just getting started.

Here’s to the next billions of miles!