Welcoming NextBillion.ai to the M12 portfolio

We’re thrilled to welcome NextBillion.ai—a leading geospatial data platform—to the M12 portfolio with their latest funding milestone. 

Location intelligence is core to an increasing number of customer scenarios—whether you’re providing an ETA for a rideshare car, tracking the location of a package on an 18-wheeler, or routing a pizza delivery in dense city traffic on a moped. Globally, companies spend billions of dollars a year on their mapping stack, but enterprise location-based solutions are long overdue for disruption. Existing one-map-fits-all solutions do not support the variety of enterprise-specific needs, forcing companies to forfeit the use of proprietary end user data, or implement DIY hacks. NextBillion.ai disrupts the existing status quo by helping large enterprises build, scale, and manage their own geospatial data ecosystem, cost-effectively.

For too long, enterprises have not been able to fully leverage their proprietary location data, whether it’s from their operations or end users. That data can be incredibly valuable, helping a business owner make informed strategic shifts to improve end customer experience or cut down costs. But for the most part, location and mapping data has been controlled by a few major players. Enterprises have been encumbered by expensive hacks, attempting to unlock value with incumbent solutions. But NextBillion.ai is shifting the paradigm, empowering enterprises to combine the best public map data with their owned location data to better serve customers. Just a year since its founding, the company has enabled enterprises from 20 countries to manage their own spatial data ecosystem—mapping over 2.5 million miles of road globally. They’ve become a trusted partner to many industry leaders in transportation, technology, and logistics.

Nextbillion.ai is creating new product categories: Map Data as a Service (MDaaS) and Location Platform as a Service (LPaaS). They are building the foundation for delivering a highly scalable lakehouse that offers derivative applications, analytics, and location data tools. The data platform is on a trajectory to replace traditional mapping and location data tooling with a reimagined and decentralized geospatial data platform. Supporting on-premises deployments, multi-tenant cloud models, and enterprise-owned maps at scale, NextBillion.ai is delivering configurability, reliability, and performance across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. 

The core team—founders Gaurav Bubna, Ajay Bulusu, and Shaolin Zheng—has incredible experience in the mapping space, previously leading the geospatial data platform at the Southeast Asian app Grab in Singapore. They have demonstrated success in building-for-scale and have established a strong reputation in the OpenStreetMap community. 

The team plans to use this latest round of funding to accelerate their expansion into North America and other global markets and advance their product roadmap. I am excited to work alongside existing investors Lightspeed and Falcon Edge Capital, and look forward to joining the NextBillion.ai board. Congratulations to Gaurav, Ajay, Shaolin, and the entire team on this major milestone. NextBillion.ai is a transformative and disruptive player in the geospatial space, and we look forward to your continued growth.