Former Grab execs’ AI startup nets $7m in series A money

NextBillion, a Singapore-based startup focused on providing AI mapping solutions to enterprises, has closed US$7 million in a series A funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.

NextBillion is also backed by angel investors such as Cassandra founder Prashant Malik and Mad Street Den founders Anand Chandrasekeran and Ashwini Asokan, as well as Nishant Rao, ex-chief operating officer at Freshworks.

Photo credit: NextBillion

According to a statement, the startup will use the fresh capital to expand its team and invest in research and development for new focus areas such as facial recognition, natural language processing, and cybersecurity.

What problem is it solving? By combining people, tech, and software, NextBillion said it aims to build multiple use cases for enterprises to help them expand in emerging and developed markets. It’s also focused on providing businesses with hyperlocal solutions.

“Emerging markets across the world are far more complex – with different languages, cultures, hyperlocal nuances, and densely populated cities – than the developed markets,” said Gaurav Bubna, co-founder of NextBillion.

Its first product NextBillion Maps is a software-as-a-service platform that provides application programming interfaces for routing, navigation, direction, and distance matrix. The startup looks to offer new AI tools that support map data curation and maintenance soon.

It’s currently developing its second product NextBillion Tasks, which uses AI for multilingual texts, image classification, sentiment analysis, and video annotations.

With the AI space already dominated by more familiar names such as China’s SenseTime, NextBillion said it can partner with incumbent players that wish to go global by providing services like facial recognition data collection and annotation.

How much traction has it gotten? The company, which was established just this year, said it already has a couple of paying customers and over 20 pilots globally. It has also onboarded global companies in social, ride-hailing, food delivery, and logistics sectors, seeing growth in markets such as Singapore, the US, Europe, Indonesia, China, and India.

Who are the team members? NextBillion was built by co-founders Gaurav Bubna, Ajay Bulusu, and Shaolin Zheng, who were previously part of ride-hailing giant Grab’s tech leadership team. They helped develop features like routing, pricing, and estimated time of arrival for Grab Maps.

The rest of the NextBillion team, meanwhile, consist of software engineers from Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance.