NextBillion.ai Co-founders Gaurav Bubna (L) and Ajay Bulusu
NextBillion.ai, an Artificial Intelligence-powered hyperlocal solutions startup in Singapore, today announced the completion of its Series A investment co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.
This brings the firm’s total funding raises in Series A to US$7 million.
With a presence in Singapore, China and India, the startup will utilise the capital to grow its team, product and R&D in future focus areas.
NextBillion.ai was co-founded earlier this year by Gaurav Bubna, Ajay Bulusu, and Shaolin Zheng — all former tech-leadership members of Grab who developed Grab Maps.
The AI startup is focused on building hyperlocal solutions, particularly in emerging markets where language and geospatial infrastructure challenges are significantly complex and unique.
Among its product is nextbillionmaps, which provides customisable features, such as routing and navigation, matrix calculation, and map data curation.
The second product currently under-the-making is nextbilliontasks, where AI is used for decoding of data to simplify multilingual texts, image classification, sentiment analysis and video annotations.
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Co-founder and CTO Shaolin Zheng said: “From mapping to natural language processing, content moderation, facial-recognition and cybersecurity related challenges, our AI solutions are aligned with hyperlocal nuances in both emerging markets and developed markets, which is ideal for companies who wish to expand on a global level.
We see great opportunities in China and the potential to support more and more businesses with NextBillion AI solutions for their expansion into emerging markets in the Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and Indian region,” he added.
Co-founder Bubna said: “Emerging markets across the world are far more complex, with different languages, cultures, hyperlocal nuances and densely populated cities, than the developed markets.
With our first product nextbillionmaps, we are building an intuitive and intelligent location AI-platform by using open-source data combined with proprietary client data, that makes logistics, transport, ride-hailing, delivery, e-commerce solutions accessible, effective, efficient and affordable. We intend to expand into multiple verticals by delivering world-class AI-powered solutions to our customers,” he added.
NextBillion.ai has already on-boarded several global brands in the social media, ride-hailing, food delivery, freight and logistics industries across China, Southeast Asia, India and the US.
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