For San Francisco-based startup Point One Navigation, the value of “location, location, location” goes far beyond real estate. And investors seem to agree.
Point One Navigation, a startup that has developed precision location technology, just raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Khosla Ventures. The company is now valued at $230 million after assets are invested, according to one of the people familiar with the deal.
Founded in 2016, Point One has developed precise location technology that can be applied to any moving vehicle, from autonomous consumer lawn mowers and drones to robots, consumer vehicles, agricultural equipment, and even humans with wearable devices.
For point 1, exact location means just that. The technology is called a positioning engine, and under the best conditions it can pinpoint your location to within a centimeter, co-founder Aaron Nathan told TechCrunch.
To achieve this, Point One has integrated Enhanced Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), computer vision, and sensor fusion into its API. Most new vehicles, such as sophisticated EVs and luxury cars, are equipped with the necessary hardware, so the API is typically deployed as a software product. For vehicles like farm equipment or otherwise first responders, Point One adds a chipset to the mix.
Point 1 began with a focus on automotive customers, a sign of bullish times for self-driving car technology. This segment continues to account for the majority of revenue. Point One could not reveal the names of most of its commercial customers, but did share that its technology supports EV manufacturers’ advanced driver assistance and infotainment needs and is installed in more than 150,000 of its vehicles.
Point One also has contracts with some of the largest lawn care and lawn care manufacturers, distributors with 300,000 last-mile delivery vehicles, and global manufacturers of street and racing bikes.
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But Nathan said the startup started branching out into other areas around 2021, when it announced a $10 million Series A round. As a result, implementation began in earnest. Over the past year, the number of manufacturers using Point One Navigation’s technology platform has increased tenfold, spanning automotive, robotics, industrial, and wearables.
“And now it’s only accelerating,” Nathan says.
Point One’s Series C round will be used to build out all aspects of the company’s technology, including the so-called Polaris RTK network. This is critical hardware that helps deliver centimeter-level accuracy even in sparsely populated areas of North America, Europe, and Asia.
“From precision agriculture to paint lines to garden mowing, the industry continues to demand greater precision,” Tom Weeks, COO of the company, told TechCrunch. “You can’t go beyond the flower bed by 10 centimeters. So everything is within 1 to 3 centimeters.”
To achieve this level of accuracy, Point One spent eight years developing its RTK network. An RTK network is a system of small units, about the size of a lunch box, installed in a secure location, such as a cell phone tower facility, that corrects position. To create a dense network, these stations must be within 40 kilometers of the vehicle or device location. That means more stations the company is building, Weeks said.
“We need good density from the agricultural Midwest states to the East Coast of the United States because we have people, we have agriculture, we have cars and trucks, we have a lot of medium-haul freight,” Weeks said. “So we’re in the process of filling it and we’re almost done.”
The startup is also working on enhancing the technology’s capabilities indoors. Currently, vehicles moving from outdoor to indoor parking will continue to retain their exact location. But Nathan wants to extend its capabilities to, for example, industrial settings, where robots may spend most of their lives indoors.
“What we build next, and that’s part of the purpose of this fundraiser, is how do we do long-term indoor navigation as well,” he said. “As we look at the evolution of the business, we want to solve for ubiquitous locations, so eventually it will be indoors and all domains.”
