Point One Navigation, a startup that developed precise location tracking, has raised $35 million in a Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures. The company’s post-money valuation is now $230 million, according to one insider familiar with the deal.
Point One co-founder Aaron Nathan says that the company’s technology, called a positioning engine, can determine location within one centimeter in the best conditions, according to TechCrunch. This technology can be applied to any vehicle that moves, from autonomous consumer lawnmowers and drones to robots, consumer vehicles, agriculture equipment, and even humans donning a wearable device.
In order to achieve this technology, Point One has combined an augmented global navigation satellite system (GNSS), computer vision, and sensor fusion into an API. That API is typically used as a software product since most new vehicles come equipped with the necessary hardware. Point One adds a chipset to vehicles that don’t like farm equipment.
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Point One was founded in 2016, and initially focused on automotive clients. The sector continues to be important for the company. Point One said that its technology supports the advanced driver assistance and infotainment needs of an EV maker and is included in more than 150,000 of its vehicles.
The startup also has contracts with some of the largest mowing and turf care manufacturers, a distribution company’s fleet of 300,000 last-mile delivery vehicles, and a global manufacturer of street and racing bikes.
Point One started branching off to other sectors in 2021, when it announced its $10 million Series A round, according to Nathan. Over the years the number of manufacturers using Point One Navigation’s technology platform has increased tenfold.
“And now it’s just accelerating,” Nathan said.
The company’s Series C funds will be used to build out all aspects of its technology, including its 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 keeps pressing to higher precision, from precision agriculture to painting lines to mowing a yard,” Tom Weeks, the company’s COO told TechCrunch. “You can’t be off by 10 centimeters and go over in a flower bed. So everything’s pressing to the one to three centimeter range.”
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“Midwestern states where farming is going on, all the way to the East Coast in the U.S., require solid density, because you have people, you have farming, you have cars and trucks, a lot of middle-mile freight,” Weeks added. “So we’re in the process of filling that out; we’re almost there.”
Point One spent eight years developing its RTK Network, a system of small lunchbox-sized units, installed in secure locations like a cell phone tower facility that provides corrections to location. Weeks said that to create a dense network, these stations need to be within 40 kilometers of that vehicle or device’s location. That means a lot of stations, which the company is building out.
“What we’re building next — and that’s part of what this fundraising is for — is, how do we do long-term indoor navigation as well,” Weeks added. “When you look at the evolution of the business, we want to solve ubiquitous location, so eventually it will be indoors and all domains.”