Posted by Mumbai: AI startup Nextbillionai has raised a $7 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.
Ajay Bulusu, Gaurav Bubna and Shaolin Zheng founded the AI startup Nextbillionai in early 2020 with an aim to be the global leader in AI-powered hyperlocal solutions.
The enterprise AI startup’s key focus areas include mapping, NLP, content moderation, facial-recognition challenges and rendering solutions for emerging markets.
Nextbillionai’s three founders were the part of Grab’s technology leadership team, which developed Grab Maps – a location platform that focused on features like ETA, routing and pricing among others.
Nextbillionai has onboarded Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed and Navroz Udwadia, Co-Founder and Partner of Falcon Edge Capital to the Board of Directors.
Besides has a global angel investors group including Nishant Rao, ex-COO of Freshworks, Prashant Malik, Founder – Cassandra, Anand Chandrasekeran and Ashwini Asokan, Founders – Mad Street Den.
“The opportunity in solving hyperlocal challenges is huge, and mapping is just one of them. We at Lightspeed are excited by the prospect of partnering with this team as they build a range of turnkey enterprise solutions around Maps, Facial AI and NLP to address the needs of the next billion consumers both in developing and developed markets,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.
“Nextbillionai team brings world-class expertise in creating enterprise mapping solutions, at scale. We are confident they will build customisable, scalable and effective hyperlocal mapping solutions tailored towards the needs of emerging markets across the world, leveraging artificial intelligence and significant domain expertise” said Navroz Udwadia, Co-Founder and Partner, Falcon Edge Capital.
“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 Ajay Bulusu, Nextbillionai’s Co-Founder.
“With our first product nextbillionmaps, we are building intuitive and intelligent location AI-platform using open-source data combined with proprietary client data, that makes logistics, transport, ride-hailing, delivery, e-commerce solutions accessible to the next billion users effectively, efficiently and affordably. We quickly intend to expand into multiple verticals delivering world-class AI-powered solutions to our customers,” added Bulusu.
Nextbillionmaps, the first product of Nextbillionai is an AI-first maps SaaS platform that provides enterprises with a range of API’s like routing, navigation, direction and distance matrix. In a first for the mapping world, they also provide highly specialized AI tooling capabilities that support map data curation and maintenance.
“We see opportunity in building an inclusive world offering equal access to technology solutions in the most intelligent, secured and affordable manner,” added Gaurav Bubna, Nextbillionai’s Co-Founder.
With presence in Singapore, China and India, Nextbillionai aims to get AI to work for solving the needs of the next billion markets. As more and more global companies set their sights on the next billion markets as their next growth engines they would need partners who can help them scale operations with hyperlocal, cost-effective and customized solutions.
The enterprise AI startup has already partnered with leading global brands representing various verticals including social media, ride-hailing, food delivery, freight and logistics across the US, India, Southeast Asia, and China.
(Image credit – Nextbillionai)