Singapore’s NextBillion.ai raises $21M Series B funding led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments

NextBillion.ai, a Singapore-based spatial data and mapping platform for enterprises, said Monday it has raised a $21 million series B led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

Existing investors Lightspeed, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund) and Alphawave also participated in the round, bringing the total funding since inception in 2020 to $34 million, NextBillion.ai said in a statement.

This funding is aimed at accelerating NextBillion.ai’s operations globally and expanding into North America and Europe. This latest round of funding also cements the company’s position as one of the leaders in building and managing decentralized geospatial technology stacks for enterprises.

“Given the current funding market environment, this round shows how strong the demand for our software is and how truly differentiated we are. We want to power everything that moves — pizza, people, or parcels. Everyone needs maps to move. Over the past year, we’ve grown rapidly and expanded our partner ecosystem to help realize our core vision of empowering businesses with all things location,

“We will use this funding to expand our global footprint and help our enterprise customers unlock value using spatial data,” said Ajay Bulusu, Co-Founder of NextBillion.ai.

Founded in March 2020, NextBillion.ai empowers enterprises to build, scale and manage their own spatial data ecosystems. The company has seen a 4 times year-on-year growth in revenue and 10 times growth in customer base. It aims to grow another 4 times through 2022.

Today, NextBillion.ai supports over 30 customers across 20+ countries and handles billions of API calls each month. The company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered APIs and SDKs help enterprises manage their spatial data at a petabyte scale. Customers such as Gojek, Coca-Cola, Grassdoor, and Zuscoffee have turned to NextBillion.ai for the speed, accuracy and cost effectiveness it offers relative to competitors such as Google Maps and Mapbox.

“We hope to provide software building blocks for businesses to build their own custom mapping technology stack. Today, if a business needs a location-centric application, we provide them with the necessary building blocks to create their own unique geospatial experience. We are trying to disrupt the way an established business consumes and manages spatial data, and the way we think about this problem is fundamentally new and different,” said Gaurav Bubna, Co-Founder of NextBillion.ai.

With the series B funding, NextBillion.ai will continue to build its modular, decentralized geospatial data platform that allows enterprises to store, enrich and utilize all of their mapping data in a single pane of glass through easy-to-use, highly scalable, industry-standard APIs.

The company has also become a trusted partner for enterprises in the ride hailing, food delivery, big tech and logistics industries.

“We are delighted to partner with NextBillion.ai as they redefine the enterprise mapping stack. Maps are critical for any location-centric enterprise, however, existing solutions today are built for a singular use case, resulting in enterprises having to use a single map for their mission-critical business functions. NextBillion.ai’s decentralized mapping platform provides enterprises with the blocks to build, scale and manage their mapping infrastructure, giving rise to customized solutions that solve multiple use cases,

“In Ajay, Gaurav and Shaolin, we believe we are backing a team that has unparalleled experience and expertise in building 0 to 1 mapping platforms at scale. NextBillion.ai is creating a new category of mapping software, and we look forward to supporting them in this journey,” said Ashish Dave, Chief Executive Officer at Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

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