Former Grab employees’ start-up Nextbillionai raises $7 mn in funding

AI-driven solutions start-up Nextbillionai has raised $7 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital. The company will use the funds to scale up hiring and launch new AI-enabled products.

The company–founded by former Grab executives Ajay Bulusu, Gaurav Bubna and Shaolin Zheng about three months ago–has launched an AI-driven mapping solution that customises APIs based on the size of the vehicles. The company has got 10 clients in India for its first product from sectors such as logistics, ecommerce, food delivery and freight.

“Globally, Google doesn’t provide any API except four wheeler. When you do that. Our first product Nextbillionmaps provides enterprises with a range of APIs like routing, navigation, direction and distance matrix,” said co-founder Bulusu, who is a former Google executive.

The Nextbillionai team aims to build products with AI as the backbone. For this, the founders have hired engineers from global companies like Alibaba, Tencent, TikTok and Google. The second product that the start-up is working on is a full stack AI labelling platform called Nextbilliontasks. The product decodes data and simplifies multi-lingual texts, image classification, and video annotations. It is also working to roll out products in the facial recognition segment.

“The opportunity in solving hyperlocal challenges is huge, and mapping is just one of them. We at Lightspeed are excited by the prospect of partnering with this team as they build a range of turnkey enterprise solutions around Maps, Facial AI and NLP to address the needs of the next billion consumers both in developing and developed markets,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner, Lightspeed Ventures.

According to reports, the current market for AI-backed products stands at $5 billion globally.