Ford recently injected a hefty sum into the 3D-mapping startup Civil Maps, which should give the automaker an edge in the race toward autonomous driving.
The company invested $6.6 million in a round with Motus Ventures at the helm. Other important names lined up in the participation list, with notable mentions going to StartX Stanford, Wicklow Capital and Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures.
Civil Maps is a startup that debuted in California in 2014 and makes use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and local vehicle-based processing to turn data delivered by the car's sensors into "meaningful map information." Such information is paramount to the proper functioning of self-driving cars.
Before Ford & Friends backed it up, the venture managed to raise about $3 million.
Civil Maps underlines that the recent injection of capital, which it calls a "seed" investment, will go straight to product development and the deployment of its technology into the car manufacturing sector.
It looks like the interest for financing the development of autonomous driving technologies has spiked recently.
No sooner than this week, the startup dubbed FiveAI raised $2.7 million from strategic investors. The premise of the company is an interesting one, as FiveAI plans to leave behind the need to have constantly actualized 3D maps for autonomous vehicles. Instead, the venture proposes that the car builds the map as it drives around the environment.
Earlier this year, General Motors (GM) purchased Cruise Automation, a self-driving car startup, for more than $1 billion.
BMW will team up with Intel and Mobileye to bring self-driving cars to the roads by 2021. Toyota is not sitting idly either, as it recruited Google's head of robotics and set it to push the pedal to the metal for in-house A.I. to bolster its autonomous vehicles.
Whether archived and updated or real-time generated, maps will be a key factor to the success of self-driving cars. Google seems to be aware of that, as the company already has built one of the most comprehensive mapping systems on the market.
Despite Civil Maps' young age, the venture managed to leverage its experience and create value for investors.
According to the company, its systems' software crunches raw 3D data it receives via its Lidar (high-resolution laser imaging) and compiles it with the information delivered by on-board sensors. The end result is a machine-readable map that "requires a fraction of the data storage and transmission for existing technologies."
One big selling point of the technology is that it creates a very small data footprint, making it mobile-friendly.
"Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map," says Sravan Puttagunta, the helm of Civil Maps.
Puttagunta mentions that the scalable map generation process helps self-driving cars drive just as humans would. This means that the vehicles will be ready to identify "on-road and off-road features," whether or not they are fully visible or in a perfect state.
The Civil Maps CEO underlines how grateful his company is to team up with Ford, and is determined to push the autonomous vehicles technologies "at continental scale."
