Technology

Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information—like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double parked vehicle—so they can take the safest and most efficient route possible.

This specific need has provided an opening for startups in what once looked like a locked up mapping market dominated by a few giants.

Carmera,a New York-based mapping and data analytics startup, is one of them. The company, which came out of stealth two years ago, has now raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. Carmera previously raised $6.5 million.

The company announced the funding raise Thursday along with a few other updates including a new feature on its autonomous mapping product and a partnership with New York City. The capital will be used to hire more talent and expand.

&We&ll be doing the most aggressive hiring we&ve ever done this next year,& Carmera co-founder and CEO Ro Gupta told TechCrunch, adding that the company will mostly focus on building out its New York and Seattle offices. Carmera, which has about 25 employees, plans to have more than 50 by the end of next year.

&The money also allows us to be more prospective than simply reacting to customer needs,& Gupta added.

In other words, Carmera can move into new markets where it suspects there will be a need in the future, not just wait for a call from their customers. One of those customers is Voyage, the autonomous driving startup that currently operates self-driving cars in retirement communities.

Carmera has an interesting business model, and one thatlikely attractive to investors looking for startups with a present-day revenue stream. The companydescribes itself as a street intelligence platform for autonomy. Itmain product is the Carmera autonomous map, a high-definition map for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers, and robotaxis.

The twist here is that the company uses data gleaned from its other product—a fleet monitoring service used by commercial customers with vehicles driven by humans—to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk with their vehicles and drivers.

These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities.Carmera calls this a &pro-sourcing& swarm.

The startup has now added a real-time events and change management engine to its autonomous map that Gupta contends is a major leap forward because it not only provides more detailed information to self-driving vehicles, it gives these driverless vehicles a suggested path.

In some mapping products, theregeneral a base map and then a dynamic overlay. The problem, Gupta explains, is that when things change like a lane closure, the dynamic map only flags it, leaving it up to the vehicle to figure out what to do next.

&That works fine when humans are driving, it just doesn&t go far enough for AVs,& Gupta said. &What they need to know is how do I path plan around it&

Carmerareal-time events and change management feature.

The map will detect a change in milliseconds, classify it within seconds and then validate and redraw the base map within minutes, according to Carmera. The company isgiving companies deploying autonomous vehicles API access to this data at every stage.

Carmera also has a &site intelligence product,& a jargon term that means the company provides spatial data and street analytics (like how pedestrians move within a particular intersection) to urban planners.

Carmera announced Thursday it will begin sharing data such as historical pedestrian analytics and real-time construction detection with New York CityDepartment of Transportation. Carmera will get access to key city data sets in return. The partnership with NYC DOT followsanearlier data sharing initiativewith the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are no longer solely the domain of super cheap smart speakers. Google, in particular, has been courting third-party hardware makers pretty aggressively in an attempt to put the consumer AI on as wide a range of products as possible.

Bang - OlufsenBeoSound 1 and 2 certainly hit the high of the spectrum. The pricey speakers are the first in the companyline to get Google Assistant functionality, though B-O has already promised to add it across its devices. Both models already feature the tech necessary for such an addition, including an array of five mics.

The companyalso added four buttons on top of the device, which can be assigned to various functions, like weather, news and the like. New models will ship with Assistant on board starting next month, priced at of $1,750 and $2,250 for the 1 and two, respectively.

The success of Airbnb has created a major disruption in how people choose where to stay when they visit other places. Gone are the days of assuming a hotel is the best or only option; a selection of private accommodations might prove to be more interesting, cheaper and more flexible. Now, an Airbnb-like startup out of Germany called Homelike — which focuses on rentals of a month or more, often for business but also other customers — has raised $14 million to expand its business to more of Europe, starting with the UK.

Pointedly, the company, does not believe that it is competing directly with Airbnb, in part because of its focus on those longer rentals and in part because none of the properties posted on the platform are private homes. &Homelike starts where Airbnb ends,& said co-founder and CEO Dustin Figge in an interview. Since being founded in 2015, itfound a willing customer base on both sides of its marketplace. It currently has listings for 45,000 furnished apartments and works with more than 15,000 corporate clients across 100 cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the aim to cover all the major business hubs in Europe by the end of next year.

Led by Spark Capital, this round also included previous investors Cherry Ventures and coparion, among others. (Of note, this is the latest in a growing number of investments in Europe for Bay Area-based Spark that have focused on marketplaces and commerce. Others have included another rentals platform, Badi; insurance startup Coya; and elderly care platform Careship, in addition to social payments app Verse.) This brings the total raised by Homelike to $18 million in disclosed investments, alongside earlier, undisclosed rounds, Figge said.

Homelikefunding and general growth come at a time when Airbnb has been on a roll. The company has said it would be ready to IPO from the end of June 2019, and in the meantime is already profitable on an Ebitda basis as it expands into a plethora of other services to diversify and position itself as a &travel experiences& business — including working with a growing number of corporate clients and integrating with business travel booking services. But with that growth has not always been smooth, with the company facing a fair amount of regulatory tussles across a number of markets.

Figge says that his companyfocus on working with people who own or manage properties that were designed for renting out, and its focus on the longer the timeframe — the minimum is around one month, woth the average stay more like four months, he said — has helped it play nice with official bodies as well as stay out of direct competition with the much larger Airbnb and other big platforms that have been hotly competing with it.

Homelikemain clients are businesses ranging in size from larger corporates to small startups, and the idea is that ittapping into the fact that in our global economy, workers might need to move to new cities on a temporary basis, or might need to make permanent moves with little advance warning. When you are living in a city for more than a week or two, living out of a hotel can become less convenient — not to mention more expensive — and that is the gap that Homelike is hoping to fill.

But there are use cases. For example, if you are living in a home or apartment that you need to vacate if it&s, say, undergoing a big renovation (or maybe you have simply rented it out for too many Airbnb weekends! I kid…), sometimes it can be hard to find short-term leases. This is also where Homelike can come in handy.

Just as Airbnb has expanded into areas like things to do once you arrive at your destination, and helping you plan your travel from point A to point B, so, too, does Homelike hope to grow not just by expanding to more cities and users, but also by expanding the services is provides to its users.

&We want to fix the prob for longer term apartment rental first of all, but when you are relocating you need more services, too,& Figge said. &Local service recommendations, insurance, mobility information, cleaning services, gym memberships, there is a lot where we could help with in the next couple of years. There are so many things you can optimise.&

And thaton the renter side only. On the supply side, he noted that many property owners are still stuck in the offline world when it comes to the management systems and accounting services they use. The aim, he said, will be to provide something end-to-end for both renting customers and those supplying properties, where information doesn&t need to be entered repeatedly and works more efficiently. Homelike won&t be the first to think about this: Lovely also saw a similar opportunity several years ago in the very-long-term — year or more — rental market. It was eventually was acquired by RentPath.

Interestingly, it sounds like Homelike has also been attracting attention from bigger players in the same space of temporary accommodation, where Homelikeservice and footprint might complement what the bigger business has already built. Figge got cagey when I asked about this, but if the startup keeps growing as it has, I have a feeling this may not be the last time we hear about Homelike.