For San Francisco-based startup Point One Navigation, the value of “location, location, location” extends well beyond real estate. Investors seem to agree. The startup, which develops precise location technology, has raised thirty-five million dollars in a Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures. According to an insider familiar with the deal, the company’s post-money valuation is now two hundred and thirty million dollars.
Founded in 2016, Point One Navigation has created precise location technology that can be applied to any vehicle that moves. This includes autonomous consumer lawnmowers, drones, robots, consumer vehicles, agriculture equipment, and even humans wearing a wearable device. For Point One, precise location means exactly that. The technology, called a positioning engine, can determine location within one centimeter under the best conditions.
To achieve this, Point One combines an augmented global navigation satellite system, computer vision, and sensor fusion into an API. This API is typically deployed as a software product because most new vehicles, such as modern electric or luxury cars, come equipped with the necessary hardware. For vehicles that do not have the hardware, like farm equipment or a first responder vehicle, Point One adds a chipset.
Point One started with a focus on automotive clients, a sign of the bullish autonomous vehicle technology times. That sector continues to make up a large slice of its revenue. The company could not disclose most of its commercial customer names but did share that its technology supports the advanced driver assistance and infotainment needs of an electric vehicle maker and is included in more than one hundred and fifty thousand of its vehicles. Point One also has contracts with some of the largest mowing and turf care manufacturers, a distribution company’s fleet of three hundred thousand last-mile delivery vehicles, and a global manufacturer of street and racing bikes.
The startup began to branch out to other sectors around 2021 when it announced its ten million dollar Series A round. That helped kick adoption into high gear. Over the past year, the number of manufacturers using Point One Navigation’s technology platform has increased tenfold and spans automotive, robotics, industrial, and wearable sectors. The company states that this growth is now accelerating.
Point One’s Series C round will be used to build out all aspects of its technology, including its Polaris RTK Network. This is 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 for higher precision, from precision agriculture to painting lines to mowing a yard. You cannot be off by ten centimeters and go over into a flower bed, so everything is pressing to the one to three centimeter range.
To get that kind of precision, Point One spent eight years developing its RTK Network. This system consists of small lunchbox-sized units installed in secure locations like cell phone tower facilities that provide corrections to location. To create a dense network, these stations need to be within forty kilometers of a vehicle or device’s location, which requires a lot of stations. The company is building out this network, stating they are almost there, covering Midwestern farming states all the way to the East Coast where there are people, farming, cars, trucks, and a lot of middle-mile freight.
The startup is also working to enhance the technology’s capability indoors. Currently, vehicles traveling from outdoors to an indoor parking structure will continue to have precise location. However, the company wants to extend that capability to industrial settings where a robot may spend the bulk of its life inside. What they are building next, and part of the reason for this fundraising, is to solve long-term indoor navigation as well. The evolution of the business is to solve ubiquitous location, so eventually it will work indoors and in all domains.