Carmera raises $20 million to serve growing need for real-time maps

Real-time mapping startup Carmera has raised a $20 million Series B round led by Google Ventures, the company announced today.

The new round will fund Carmera’s latest expansion into Japan and South Korea and facilitate expanding partnerships with professional fleets, research institutions, autonomous drive technology developers and mobility-as-a-service companies.

“A lot of the car companies want to know that a new supplier can actually scale globally,” said Ro Gupta, Carmera founder and CEO. “Our customers all have real production and commercial deployment with real scale in mind, so it’s important that we are equipped for the long term and that we can achieve continental scale.”

Carmera’s expansion into Asia builds on deployments in New York, California, Florida, and Michigan. The latest move overseas brings Carmera to the island of Jeju, South Korea, where it is partnering with the South Korean automotive supplier conglomerate Nexen Tech to map the tourist destination and electric-vehicle hub ahead of the rollout of a future mobility service.

“From a deployment standpoint, the U.S. and Asia are still where most of the activity is happening,” Gupta said.

Those deployments are driving Carmera’s growth faster than Gupta had expected.

“Autonomous vehicles had always been our North Star,” he said, but the company wasn’t sure when it would have a product ready to sell. “It became abundantly clear over the last year that there was a ton of pent-up demand for a high quality HD mapping service that weren’t glorified point clouds. We quickly realized we had to focus all our efforts on that.”

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