New Company Uses Delivery Fleets to Create Maps

Carmera, a New York City-based startup, is proposing technology which constantly refreshes GPS mapping data. This would be crucial for any company working on self-driving technology.

By CEO and co-founder Ro Gupta’s measure, the current market for 3D mapping data falls into three buckets: Good, but not for sale; decent, but expensive, slow to update, and only for sale to auto manufacturers; and bad and two-dimensional, but free. Gupta, formerly Head of Business Development at Disqus, and his co-founder Justin Day, a former CTO of Makerbot, saw an opportunity to offer a product that Gupta categorizes as "good, but efficient, affordable, and accessible."

Gupta explains the company’s unique solution to the 3D mapping problem: It has partnered with delivery fleets to collect its data. In exchange for attaching sensors on top of their fleet vehicles, Carmera provides its partners, including storage startup MakeSpace, with video monitoring data and data analytics around safety and efficiency.

The company calls its approach "pro-sourced" – crowdsourcing with professional quality control. The data is only available in New York City so far. The company supplements the fleet data with its own vehicle.

But the fleet monitoring is not the company’s primary business. The company wants to get this 3d mapping data into the hands of any business that can benefit. That goes beyond companies working on self-driving technology.

The company’s videos create a model of foot traffic for an entire city. That data that is valuable to city planners and the real estate and retail industries that normally rely on unreliable GPS data.