PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - May 4, 2017) - DeepMap today announced its $25 million Series A round led by Accel, with participation from seed-stage investors Andreessen Horowitz and GSR Ventures. This round of funding brings the company's total raise to $32 million.
DeepMap is a team of senior Google and Apple mapping and cloud infrastructure software engineers and LiDAR pioneers that are solving a critical and complex part of the novel software infrastructure for self-driving vehicles. The company partners with auto industry companies to enable them to meet their self-driving launch deadlines, and to then safely and seamlessly increase the level of autonomy for their vehicles over time.
DeepMap's service delivers the capabilities necessary for self-driving cars to navigate in the complex and unpredictable real world by addressing three important elements: precise high-definition mapping, ultra-accurate real-time localization and the serving infrastructure to support massive global scaling.
The technology maps road environment to the centimeter level, tells the self-driving vehicle precisely where it is and shares updates with other vehicles running off DeepMap's platform, in real time when needed. The technology also manages the associated data in a very cost-efficient and highly scalable manner.
With this round of funding, DeepMap will further expand and optimize its HD mapping and localization platform, and continue to selectively expand its team of exceptional and rare mapping and self-driving talent.
"Our goal is to help make self-driving cars and trucks drive safely and make them a reality as quickly as possible," said James Wu, CEO and co-founder of DeepMap. "The societal implications of integrating self-driving vehicles into the transportation ecosystem are considerable -- from more independence for the elderly, the young and the handicapped, to saving many lives and making commuting a more meaningful use of time. But to get there, we need precise mapping and localization technology that is purpose-built from the ground up and ensures the highest possible safety, performance and operating efficiency. Solving this challenge to a point where it's safely deployable in the real world is very hard, time-consuming and expensive. We can help automotive companies get to market faster with better technology, less risk and by spending much less."
"We are focused on teams solving the urgent, important problems in this category," said Sameer Gandhi, Partner with Accel. "The DeepMap team is building the critical technology to enable precise and safe navigation -- and thus, unlock the potential for autonomous vehicles."
"Autonomous vehicles are tempting us with a radically new future," said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "However, this level of autonomy requires a highly sophisticated mapping and localization infrastructure that can handle massive amounts of data. I'm very excited to work with James and the DeepMap team, who have the requisite expertise in mapping, vision, and large scale operations, as they build the core technology that will fuel the next generation of transportation."
DeepMap is a team of veteran mapping and self-driving experts who have pioneered world-class, globally-scaled mapping systems at companies like Google, Apple and Baidu. Building high-quality high-definition maps for self-driving vehicles requires expertise across several disciplines, including massively scaled mapping, sensor fusion, machine learning, computer vision, SLAM, embedded systems, computational geometry and geometric modeling, and cloud infrastructure.
DeepMap's team collectively has centuries of experience in these disciplines and is selectively adding elite global talent to build the industry-leading HD mapping and localization solution.