Lightspeed leads round for Singapore mapping software player
Lightspeed India Partners and Falcon Edge Capital have led a $7 million Series A round for Nextbillion, a Singapore-based provider of artificial intelligence-enabled mapping software solutions.
The company was established in 2019 by a group that includes individuals who previously worked on mapping software for ride-hailing and local services platform Grab. It counts a number of start-up founders as seed investors.
Nextbillion offers mapping, natural language processing, content moderation and facial-recognition related software for enterprise customers with operations in developing markets. Many are involved in logistics, ride-hailing, fleet management, e-commerce, autonomous driving, and delivery. The company is headquartered in Singapore and has offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Beijing.
“Emerging markets across the world are far more complex, with different languages, cultures, hyperlocal nuances and densely populated cities, than the developed markets. We see opportunity in these complexities,” said Nextbillion co-founder Ajay Bulusu, according to a statement.
Apart from Nextbillionmaps, an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled mapping software-as-a-service solution, the company offers data processing services through Nextbilliontasks. This business helps customers use AI tools to help simplify multilingual text, classify images, analyze sentiments, and annotate videos.
A number of companies offer similar mapping solutions in various geographies. For example, US-based Mapbox is one of the leading providers of open-source maps in the world. Most start-ups leverage data made available by the UK-based non-profit Open Street Map Foundation.
This is Lightspeed's seventh investment in India and Indonesia so far this year. Others include participation in a $20 million round for Indian conversational AI platform Yellow Messenger.
Lightspeed has affiliates in China and India that invest their own pools of capital, with the latter also covering Southeast Asia. The parent firm participates in follow-on rounds on a global level. In April, it raised $4 billion for early and growth-stage funds, including $1.5 billion for an opportunity fund that will support breakout companies in markets like China, India, and Southeast Asia.
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