UNL, a Singapore-based startup providing micro-location and mapping technology, has announced a US$4.5 million pre-Series A raise.
The round was led by existing shareholder HERE Technologies, a location platform for navigation and mapping owned by the consortium of German carmakers Audi, BMW and Daimler.
Other participants are returning investors, including Singapore-based deep-tech backers Elev8.vc, SGInnovate, and Venturerock.
Fernando Herrera, founder of European cloud service provider Nordcloud, also co-invested.
UNL will use the proceeds to expand operations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In these markets, the company will be focusing on solving challenges in last-mile and logistics, starting with bringing accuracy and precision to addressing, geocoding and dynamic routing.
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This deal comes over a year after UNL secured a US$2 million funding in 2020.
Founded in 2018, UNL offers a library of plug-and-play geospatial solutions to help businesses build scalable, hyper-local services and applications — from e-commerce to last-mile and smart city solutions.
To simplify, UNL pixelises the physical world into a multi-resolution smart grid to give any location a digital and verifiable address — UNL geoID — similar to an IP address. UNL geoIDs uniquely map out and address spaces with up to 1×1 cm2 precision, covering outdoor, indoor and elevation.
This solution can be plugged into any step of the supply chain, supporting the greater movement of goods and from supplier to vendor to end-user, providing clients with delivery and navigation within large buildings.
In addition, by giving a unique digital address (UNL geoID) to every geolocation, UNL enables direct interaction with physical locations and accurately links data to locations to contextually represent real-world situations and events.
“[UNL] can solve some of the biggest hyperlocal challenges that traditional mapping hasn’t been able to do so far — starting with accuracy and precision in mapping, addressing, real-time routing and self-healing maps,” said Founder and CEO Xander van der Heijden.
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UNL plans to launch a cloud-based visual editor in the short term, where companies can create their own custom virtual private maps and manage micro-services and points of interest (POI) data without any coding. Those real-time updates can be connected to a business’ existing applications such as driver apps, order and fleet management systems.
Shortly, ready-to-use applications will be made available in the UNL MAppStore.
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Image Credit: UNL
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