A California start-up working on artificial intelligence-powered mapping software for self-driving cars today received $6.6 million from a group of investors that includes the Ford Motor Company.
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Using data crowdsourced, processed, and transmitted by Civil Maps, fully autonomous vehicles could identify on-road and off-road features, understand what they mean, and notice when they change, allowing them to react like human drivers (when they aren’t playing Pokémon Go). The company had raised nearly $3 million before today’s announcement.
Apart from mapping technology, the company planned to speed up production development and deployment with several automakers and tech co-developers.
While automakers had already invested resources in autonomous auto technology, or the related operation of vehicle sharing, this comes as among the first investments in the broader facilitation of autonomous infrastructure. The computer directs the auto to stop for people crossing the street and other vehicles on the road, and it automatically identifies construction signs and uploads their text to the cloud to warn other autonomous vehicles.
The round was led by Motus Ventures with participation from Ford Motor Company, Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. General Motors Co spent almost US$1 billion acquiring self-driving software maker Cruise Automation and invested US$500 million for a 9 per cent stake in ride-hailing company Lyft Inc.
BMW will team up with Intel and Mobileye to bring self-driving cars to the roads by 2021.
Despite Civil Maps’ young age, the venture managed to leverage its experience and create value for investors. The end result is a machine-readable map that “requires a fraction of the data storage and transmission for existing technologies”.
“Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map”, says Sravan Puttagunta, the helm of Civil Maps. This means that the vehicles will be ready to identify “on-road and off-road features”, whether or not they are fully visible or in a flawless state.
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“Civil Maps’ pioneering mapping technology is building the backbone of our fully autonomous future”, Ford CEO Mark Fields said in a statement.
