What sets us apart from our competitors is our unique ability to offer open-source solutions’ customisability, developer friendliness and low cost with proprietary solutions’ high degree of performance and quality, says Gaurav Bubna, Co-founder, NextBillion.ai.
Q Do give us a brief about Nextbillion.ai.
NextBillion.ai is a spatial data platform that helps enterprises manage location data and adopt an AI-first approach at scale for every use case and geography. We are backed by Falcon Edge Capital, Lightspeed India Partners and M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund. We offer tailored Map Data Management services, be it
creating custom maps, managing custom data layers or overlaying proprietary data on top of APIs/location platforms.
We provide seamless downstream integrations with all standard mapping engines — APIs, SDKs, Map Tiles, Geocoding and Route Optimisation. NextBillion.ai also partners with system integrator experts in the enterprise location application ecosystem — to fill the gaps that can’t be served by existing solutions like Google Maps, Mapbox, HERE and TomTom. Our agile architecture can merge, manage, process, enhance, and edit location data of any type/volume and from any source — open source, proprietary, existing mapping solutions or real-time.
Q What is Map Self Reliance?
Maps and location intelligence sit at the core of every industry’s growth and development. Even more so after 2020, when the world had to find a way to function with restrictions on mobility and unprecedented logistical challenges. Right from meeting the huge surge in demand for home delivery services, optimising supply chains to designing safe commute systems, the maps and location data industry helped enterprises to manage their operations during the pandemic.
Enterprises are now not only generating huge volumes of raw data but also have access to a free crowdsourced map data alternative — OpenStreetMap (OSM). Using that, these businesses can build their in-house, customised and owned maps stack and become map self-reliant. But highly specialised mapping expertise is needed to create enterprise-grade tools and solutions out of the data generated from various sources. NextBillion.ai has stepped into this huge unexplored space in the spatial data management industry and is enabling enterprises to build a self-sustaining location ecosystem.
Q What are the challenges being faced by you from your competitors? What steps are being taken to overcome them?
Within the broader mapping and location services market, NextBillion.ai specialises in outdoor location-based services for enterprises, a space otherwise dominated by Google Maps, HERE and TomTom (all of whom maintain high cost and proprietary base map data). There are other players who build APIs, SDKs and other location services on top of existing map data sources. Mapbox, which has built a developer-oriented product, has also emerged as a formidable competitor.
What sets us apart from our competitors is our unique ability to offer open-source solutions’ customisability, developer friendliness and low cost with proprietary solutions’ high degree of performance and quality. As an industry-leading spatial data platform, NextBillion.ai’s goal is to focus on solving a fundamental problem through our authoritative map data management solutions. Our tech is built for a multi-tenant world and can be scaled remotely from anywhere across the globe. We intend to be a pure software business with SaaS margins.
Q What is your present network?
The company has scaled to supporting 15 customers across 20 countries and helped enterprises map over 2.5M miles of roads and handled 20B+ API calls. We are serving top customers including some global category leaders in e-commerce, logistics, food delivery, and groceries. We are expecting to 5x our customer base this year and 4x our annual revenues for 2021.
