For startups based in San Francisco Navigation Point Onethe value of “location, location, location” extends far beyond real estate. And investors seem to agree.
Point One Navigation, a startup that has developed precise location technology, just raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Khosla Ventures. The company’s post-money valuation is now $230 million, according to one of the people familiar with the deal.
Founded in 2016, Point One has developed precision tracking technology that can be applied to any moving vehicle, from autonomous consumer lawnmowers and drones to robots, consumer vehicles, agricultural equipment and even people wearing a wearable device.
For Point One, exact location means just that. The technology, called a positioning engine, can pinpoint the location to within 1 centimeter in the best conditions, co-founder Aaron Nathan told TechCrunch.
To achieve this, Point One has combined an augmented global navigation satellite system (GNSS), computer vision and sensor fusion into one API. Usually this API is developed as a software product because most new vehicles — such as a sleek EV or a luxury car — are equipped with the necessary hardware. For vehicles like farm equipment or say a first person that doesn’t, Point One adds a chipset to the mix.
Point One began with a focus on automotive customers — a sign of the boom times in autonomous vehicle technology. This sector still accounts for a large portion of its revenue. Point One could not disclose most of the names of its commercial customers, but shared that its technology supports an EV manufacturer’s advanced driver assistance and entertainment needs and is included in more than 150,000 of its vehicles.
Point One also has contracts with some of the largest lawnmower and lawn care manufacturers, a distribution company fleet of 300,000 last mile delivery vehicles and a global manufacturer of road and racing bikes.
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However, the startup began expanding into other areas around 2021, when it announced a $10 million Series A round, according to Nathan. This helped to make the adoption at a high level. In the past year, the number of manufacturers using Point One Navigation’s technology platform has increased tenfold and spans the automotive, robotics, industrial and mobile sectors.
“And now it’s just accelerating,” Nathan said.
Point One’s Series C round will be used to build all aspects of its technology, including the so-called Polaris RTK Network — a key piece of hardware that helps deliver centimeter-level accuracy even in sparsely populated areas in North America, Europe and Asia.
“The industry continues to push for more precision, from precision farming to painting lines and mowing a yard,” Tom Weeks, the company’s COO, told TechCrunch. “You can’t stay 10 centimeters and go to a flower bed. So everything is pushing the one to three centimeter range.”
To have that kind of accuracy, Point One spent eight years developing the RTK Network, a system of small lunchbox-sized units installed in secure locations such as a cell tower facility that provide location corrections. To create a dense network, these stations must be within 40 kilometers of the location of that vehicle or device. That means a lot of stations, which the company is building, Weeks said.
“The Midwestern states where agriculture continues, all the way up the East Coast in the U.S., require solid density because you’ve got people, you’ve got agriculture, you’ve got cars and trucks, a lot of mid-mileage,” Weeks said. “So we’re in the process of filling it in; we’re almost there.”
The startup is also working to boost the technology’s capabilities indoors. Today, vehicles traveling from outdoor spaces to an indoor parking structure will continue to have this exact location. But Nathan wants to extend this capability to industrial environments where a robot, for example, might spend most of its life inside.
“What we’re building next — and that’s part of the goal of this fundraiser — is how we do long-term indoor navigation as well,” he said. “When you look at the evolution of the business, we want to solve the ubiquitous location, so eventually it will be indoors and across the board.”
