Hivemapper, a global decentralized mapping startup, raises $18 million in a Series A financing round led by Multicoin Capital.
The Hivemapper Series A also attracted participation from Craft Ventures, Solana Capital, Shine Capital, and Spencer Rascoff’s 75 and Sunny Ventures. Previous investors Spark Capital, Founder Collective, and Homebrew also joined in the latest round.
Several notable angel investors also participated in the round, including Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO and Co-Founder of Solana, Raj Gokal, COO and Co-Founder of Solana, Amir Haleem, CEO and Founder at Nova Labs (formerly known as Helium), Nick Hammerschlag (formerly General Atlantic and Openview Ventures), David Rogier, CEO and Founder of Masterclass, Matt Rutler, Head of Talent at Masterclass, Luc Levesque, Shopify executive, Elie Seidman, former CEO of Tinder, Mark Williamson, COO at Masterclass, and Jaron Waldman, former Apple Maps and Rakuten executive.
This round brings Hivemapper’s total financing to $23 million.
US-based Hivemapper will use the funds to launch mainnet this summer, onboard more map contributors, and deliver the company’s first crypto-integrated dashcam, the Hivemapper Dashcam, which is available for pre-order for $449 effective immediately with shipping to begin in July 2022.
Hivemapper to disrupt global map market
Every day, billions of people around the world rely on maps and map data. Map APIs are used by insurance firms, logistics organisations, navigation and delivery apps, governments, NGOs, and many other businesses.
Maps are an important part of the world’s digital infrastructure, with a market worth $300 billion by 2022. The current size of digital map market is around $20 billion which is projected to grow with a CAGR of over 14% during the next 5 years. However, only a few businesses own and control the great bulk of them.
The global market is currently dominated by Google. Apart for Google, there are other players in the market which cater to niche categories or some specific markets – Waze, Apple, TomTom, Nearmap, ESRI, INRIX, HERE Technologies, MapQuest, LightBox, ServiceNow, Alibaba Group, Inpixon, and META. These all are centralized digital map systems.
Hivemapper flips the script by employing a crypto-based network to coordinate the building of a new global map, making mapping infrastructure open and globally available to all.
Ariel Seidman, co-founder and CEO, Hivemapper, commented:
“Hivemapper is a decentralized global map owned and operated by the people. Using a simple dashcam, anyone can contribute mapping data to Hivemapper, which helps put underrepresented geographic regions on the map and keep them up to date.”
Ariel believes that “mapping is an extremely complex, expensive, and time-consuming process.” Only the largest and most capitalized tech companies in the world have the resources to do digital mapping. Despite the huge investment and ownership by tech giants, street-level imagery in many parts of the world is only updated once every two years. “This causes cascading logistical, municipal, and political problems,” states Ariel.
Ariel pointed out that maps have the potential to be near real time, and a community-owned map like Hivemapper is the only way to “continuously construct a living, breathing, ever-updating view of our world”.
The Hivemapper Network is a blockchain-powered mapping network that incentivizes map coverage, freshness, and quality with crypto incentives and collective ownership. Map contributors are rewarded with the Hivemapper network’s native token, $HONEY, and the result is a state-of-the-art map that is constantly evolving, and that is collectively owned by its contributors.
Tushar Jain, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital, pointed out that “Hivemapper has a structural cost advantage over mapping incumbents insofar as it doesn’t have to buy or maintain extortionately expensive mapping vehicles, nor does it have to pay people to drive those cars around. Instead, the network can simply identify regions that need to be mapped and put bounties on them, which are then claimed by a vast community of map contributors who are eager to claim those rewards for simply driving their daily commutes.”
“As a result, Hivemapper creates unprecedented coverage, freshness, and quality in a radically more cost-effective way,” concludes Tushar Jain.
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