NextBillion AI — a hyperlocal solutions provider — raises $7 million in Series A funding that was led by Lightspeed India Partners and Falcon Edge Capital. The funding will be used to expand its portfolio of AI-powered offering while continuing to enhance the existing ones.
Currently, with its nextbillionmaps, the company enables clients to ‘discover next billion users.’ NextBillion AI solutions’ navigation is better than Google Maps, thereby allowing clients to optimise as well as customise their logistics, ride-hailing, fleet management, and delivery.
NextBillion AI’s nextbillionmaps can also be used by ecommerce as well as autonomous driving firms to use insights from the solutions for supply chain management and fuel ML models, respectively.
“We have a lot of hyperlocal nuances. For instance, no company gives you a specific API for route optimisation of trucks, or autos, or two-wheelers. But the route a truck takes to deliver a package versus a bike might be significantly different,” Ajay Bulusu said.
Founded in 2020, the company has quickly gained traction and is working with 20 clients across the world. However, around 50% or the clients are based in India.
“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. 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,” said Gaurav Bubna, co-founder, Nextbillionai.
As per the company, it will explore new specialisations in artificial intelligence such as natural language processing, facial recognition, among others. “As a company, we truly believe an AI-first approach can solve massive problems faced in the nextbillion user markets, and we want to be at the forefront of it,” Gaurav said.
