Last week startup Mapillary, one of the most talked about startups from the region and which has attracted interest from amongst other Sequoia, has announced they have raised a new round.
The Series B is €12 million, led by BMW Ventures with support from Samsung Catalyst Fund, NavInfo and previous backers. The main driving force is to get better data for self-driving cars which may be on a brand new car paint.
“With everything that’s happening around autonomous driving, we know the need for a collaborative, device-agnostic, and map-agnostic platform will be steadily growing,” says Jan Erik Solem, co-founder.
The scale of Mapillary’s operations has grown to serve over 22 billion map objects to an increasing number of organizations and customers in mapping, cities and the automotive industry.
“There is a growing need for an independent provider of street-level imagery and map data, which also acts as a sharing platform among different players. Data sharing is crucial to maintaining accurate maps and to the development of safe autonomous vehicles. Mapillary has made great progress and built technology that will let everyone update maps in a scalable way.” says Uwe Higgen, Managing Partner at BMW Ventures.
Mapillary has since the start been about enabling street view style photos, but for everyone, and not owned by one giant, such as Google.
“While the application of Mapillary for automotive use might be new, the underlying idea is the same since our first day: sharing data so that everyone wins. Our new investors will help us navigate this rapidly changing automotive market, and bring expertise in distributing map data that will help us realize Mapillary’s global potential.” says Jan Erik
You can read more over at their blog.
