After 7 Years of Success, Mapillary Joins Facebook to Continue Their Vision

LDV Capital invests in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis. We regularly host Vision events – check out when the next one is scheduled.

Malmo, Sweden. December 17, 2014 (Left photo, R-L: Johan Gyllenspetz, Jan Erik Solem, Kamil Nikel, Peter Neubauer, Yubin Kuang, Pau Gargallo, and Evan Nisselson with backgrounds from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland, Spain, China and US.)

BUILDING A COMPUTER VISION COMPANY FROM THE GROUND UP

Jan Erik Solem is a pioneer in computer vision who sold his first company, a facial recognition company called Polar Rose, to Apple in 2010. For the past 8 years, we have had the pleasure of co-investing with him, happy to be good friends and in 2014 had the honor of investing in his next vision, Mapillary, as the first investor.

After Jan Erik left Apple in 2013, we began having regular calls about computer vision trends and discussed a couple of potential new startup projects he was working on. One of which was Mapillary, a crowdsourced street-level imagery platform that scales and automates mapping using collaboration, cameras, and computer vision, that he was working on with a diverse international team of computer vision experts including Peter Neubauer, Johan Gyllenspetz, and Yubin Kuang.

In October 2013, I emailed Jan Erik to see how his projects were progressing, especially Mapillary. “Right now,” he said, “we have about 10 people testing the app, generating the data you see on the map at Mapillary. The site is out there but we are hoping we can keep it ‘private’ by obscurity another few weeks before we publicly release the app. Here is a link to download the app. Give it a try if you like. Would love to hear your thoughts. Bear in mind that it is rough and early.”

I downloaded their app and started mapping my neighborhood with a camera phone, my mountain bike rides with a Garmin GPS camera, my vacation travels with a dashcam in the rental car, and quickly became intrigued with their vision. Building a global street-level imagery platform that allows everyone to contribute imagery and get the data they need, would definitely make better maps.

But what was not clear to me in the early days, was why people would want to map the world with handheld cameras, dash cams, and headcams. Who wants to do this? How would they commercialize the business? However, I am a firm believer that investing at the earliest stages of startups is all about investing in people with a big vision, domain expertise, a technical solution to a big problem, and at the right time of a big macro trend.

We continued to speak monthly and then in the summer of 2014, Jan Erik shared the positive trends of their early community mapping and it was clear they had potential. He told me that they were ready to focus on Mapillary full-time. At LDV, we were honored to be their very first investor and I joined the board, at his request.

Jan Erik and I agreed to have a call every two weeks to brainstorm product plans, hiring, challenges, appropriate metrics to track, fundraising, and anything else Jan Erik wanted to speak about. After Mapillary raised their Seed financing from Sequoia in January 2015, these calls evolved to every 3 weeks.

After Atomico led their Series A in March 2016, our calls moved to every 4 weeks and we continued them monthly through their Series B led by BMWi in April 2018 until today.

With his consent, I wanted to share a couple of my lessons learned from our +7 years of our talks and Mapillary’s successes at navigating the roller coaster that is early-stage business building:

1. TEAM BUILDING MUST BE STRATEGIC & TECHNICALLY FOCUSED

From day one, I have been extremely impressed with the ability of the Mapillary team to build a deeply technical and talented, distributed team of people. Their hardworking teamwork where they want, when they want — from the Pacific US to the Australian Eastern time zone with headquarters in Malmö, Sweden, and subsidiaries in New York and Graz, Austria. According to Jan Erik, this approach enabled them to attract top talent and better address the global communities on their platform.

Over the years, their team grew to 57, their technology continued to be the most advanced, and marquee customers in sectors from Mapping, Fleets, and Governments to Autonomous Vehicle initiatives were attracted to leverage their platform. Each year, they have continued to win awards for their technological advancements from the computer vision community.

Jan Erik gave a keynote at our first LDV Vision Summit in 2014 called “Crowdsourcing Map Photos.”

2. FORESIGHT FOR COMPANY VISION & MARKET TIMING IS CRITICAL

The Mapillary team’s vision, timing, and execution was also incredibly impressive. They positioned themselves well, getting ahead of the reality of today that renders the previous methods of mapping our world not scalable, real-time, or accurate enough for the mapping needs of society. They had true foresight and got in front of the exponential growth of autonomous vehicle initiatives and the increased number of startups working on mapping, as we discussed back in January 2015.

3. COMMUNITY & DATA NETWORK EFFECTS ARE A TREMENDOUS ASSET

Community building is really at the heart of the Mapillary platform as it is founded on crowdsourced imagery submitted by and deployed in unique ways by their users. This is easy to talk about but hard to do well like they do. Today, Mapillary successfully empowers 135K members in 190 countries who have mapped over 11M kilometers around the world. In December 2019, Mapillary reached an incredible one billion images submitted to their platform. Their blog is full of stories of their incredible community members who mapped Latin America by bike, how others are using it for salmon habitat restoration in Norway, and so much more. Community building was an immense strength of Mapillary.

Mapillary Team at a September 2019 offsite

Although much has been accomplished since they first launched Mapillary, they are still in the early days of reaching their vision of mapping the world. Venture financing is never the goal but a means to help reach the vision. Commercializing startups, especially those creating a new market category takes time. It definitely does not happen overnight. We were very happy to collaborate with the whole Mapillary team and honored to be along for the ride.

We are thrilled for the team to continue toward their vision with Facebook.

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