NextBillion.ai, a leading spatial data platform has received $6.25 million in investment, extending their last year’s $7 million Series A funding round from Lightspeed and Falcon Edge Capital, at a significant valuation jump. The investment from M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, elevates the startup’s access to global markets and is a validation of their thought leadership as an early-stage SaaS leader in geospatial technology stack.
As location becomes central to most end-user interactions, building and owning the spatial data stack is becoming increasingly strategic to corporations worldwide. Founded in February 2020, NextBillion.ai helps large enterprises build, scale, and manage their own spatial data ecosystem. The company has scaled to supporting 15 customers across 20 countries, and helped enterprises map over 2.5M miles of roads, and handled 20B+ API calls.
Founders — Gaurav Bubna, Ajay Bulusu, and Shaolin Zheng — built the spatial data platform for Grab, the Southeast Asian super-app from the ground up, serving 10B+ API calls / day, enabling more revenue, better unit economics, higher dispatch efficiency, and lower cost per order, which would otherwise have been impossible with the likes of Google, TomTom, Here, and Mapbox. With NextBillion.ai, the founders are attempting a very bold vision of building a geospatial data platform for global modern and traditional enterprises — that delivers configurability, reliability and performance across structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
“Enterprise location-based solutions are long overdue for disruption—we’re no longer in a scenario where one-size-fits-all,” said Abhi Kumar, Partner at M12. “Globally, companies spend over $6.7B a year on their mapping stack, and this spend is growing faster than ever. NexBillion.ai is leading the disruption of geospatial data with great customer traction and a world class team.”
The company offers tailored spatial solutions and tools for a wide range of use cases across diverse industries and company sizes. The company has also become a trusted partner to enterprises in the ride hailing, food delivery, big tech and logistics industries.
“As a high-growth company, working with the right VC was vital for us. In the M12 team, we have found a long-term champion that is helping us scale and expand to North America and other global markets. The access provided by M12 will assist us in building a decentralized, tailored, and cost-effective mapping platform that delivers the highest level of performance and quality for even our largest and most demanding enterprise customers,” said Ajay Bulusu, co-founder of NextBillion.ai.
The tech platform aims to reimagine a geospatial data platform as opposed to being a mere replacement for traditional mapping data or location services.
About NextBillion.ai
NextBillion.ai is an industry-leading spatial data platform that delivers high performance, highly modular and configurable map and location data solutions to enterprise customers. Headquartered in Singapore with employees in the US and India, NextBillion.ai is backed by Falcon Edge Capital, Lightspeed India Partners and M12. NextBillion.ai was the Grand Winner of Startup Singapore Slingshot 2020, SG:D Techblazer Silver Winner and recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in Asia-Pacific in 2021. For more information, please visit www.nextbillion.ai.
About M12
M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, invests in early-stage enterprise software companies with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. Since 2016, M12 has invested in over 100 companies, helping startups accelerate growth with unparalleled access to Microsoft. With offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru, M12 has the team and resources to support entrepreneurs globally. M12 is a return-driven fund investing independently of Microsoft’s business units and technology offerings.
