This Khosla-backed startup can track drones, trucks and robotaxis, inch by inch

For a startup in San Francisco Single point of navigationthe value of “location, location, location” extends beyond real estate. Investors seem to agree.

Point One Navigation, a startup that has developed precise location technology, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Khosla Ventures. The company’s post-money valuation now stands at $230 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Point One, founded in 2016, has developed precise location technology that can be applied to any moving vehicle, from autonomous consumer lawnmowers and drones to robots, consumer vehicles, agricultural equipment, and even humans wearing a wearable device.

For Point One, precise location means just that. The technology, called a positioning engine, can determine location to within a centimeter in the best conditions, said Arun Nathan, co-founder of TechCrunch.

To achieve this, Point One integrates augmented Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), computer vision, and sensor fusion into an Application Programming Interface (API). This API is usually published as a software product because most new vehicles – such as an electric car or luxury car – come equipped with the necessary hardware. For vehicles like farm equipment or a first responder that doesn’t, Point One adds a chipset to the mix.

Point One is starting to focus on automotive customers — a sign of the rising era of self-driving vehicle technology. This sector still represents a large segment of its revenues. Point One couldn’t reveal most of the names of its commercial customers, but shared that its technology supports the electric car maker’s advanced driver assistance and infotainment needs and is included in more than 150,000 of its vehicles.

Point One also has contracts with some of the largest lawn mowing and care manufacturers, a distribution company fleet of 300,000 last-mile delivery vehicles, and a global manufacturer of street and racing bikes.

But the startup started branching out into other sectors around 2021 when it announced it $10 million Series A The tour, according to Nathan. This has helped drive adoption to a high level. Over the past year, the number of manufacturers using the Point One Navigation technology platform has increased tenfold and spans the automotive, robotics, industrial and wearables sectors.

“And now it’s accelerating,” Nathan said.

Point One’s C round will be used to build out all aspects of its technology, including the so-called Polaris RTK network — a key piece of hardware that helps provide centimeter-level accuracy even in sparsely populated areas in North America, Europe and Asia.

“The industry continues to push for greater precision, from precision farming to paint lines to yard mowing,” Tom Weeks, the company’s chief operating officer, told TechCrunch. “You can’t move 10 centimeters away and move into a flower bed. So everything compresses to a range of one to three centimeters.”

To get that kind of accuracy, Point One spent eight years developing its RTK network, a system of small, lunchbox-sized units installed in secure locations such as a cell phone 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 there are a lot of stations the company is building, Weeks said.

“The Midwestern states where farming is done, all the way to the East Coast of the United States, require solid density, because you have people, you have agriculture, you have cars and trucks, and a lot of middle-haul freight,” Weeks said. “So we’re going to fill that; we’re almost done.”

The startup is also working on strengthening the technology’s capabilities internally. Today, vehicles moving from the outside to the indoor parking lots will continue to maintain this exact location. But Nathan wants to expand this ability to include industrial environments where a robot could, for example, spend the bulk of its life indoors.

“What we’re building next — and this is part of the goal of this fundraising — is how we can do inland navigation in the long term as well,” he said. “When you look at the evolution of the business, we want to solve the location problem everywhere, so that eventually it will be indoors and across the board.”