NextBillionai adds $6.25 mn to its Series A from Microsoft’s M12

May 21, 2021: The spatial data platform NextBillion.ai has received $6.25 million in investment, extending 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 the geospatial technology stack,” reads the release. 

Abhi Kumar, Partner at M12, said, “Enterprise location-based solutions are long overdue for disruption—we’re no longer in a scenario where one-size-fits-all. 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.”

Founded in February 2020, NextBillion.ai helps large enterprises build, scale and manage their own spatial data ecosystem at scale. The company has scaled to supporting 15 customers across 20 countries and helped enterprises map over 2.5 million miles of roads and handled 20 billion+ 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. 

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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 partner to enterprises in the ride-hailing, food delivery, big tech and logistics industries.

The tech platform aims to reimagine a geospatial data platform as opposed to being a mere replacement for traditional mapping data or location services. 

Ajay Bulusu, co-founder of NextBillion.ai, said, “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.”