Sweden’s Mapillary is creating a marketplace for street-level images and map data designed to serve specific needs of users while also making its core service more robust and complete.
Mapillary is a collaborative platform that crowdsources its imagery from users who download its app and take street-level pictures with their smartphones. Those are then shared into Mapillary’s system, where the computer vision technology breaks them down into objects and data.
The company hopes a marketplace will accelerate those efforts by creating incentives to fill in gaps where contributors are less numerous.
“It’s about connecting the supply and demand side of platform better,” said Mapillary CEO and co-founder Jan Erik Solem. “We have people who have contributed to our community who work all over the world. And we have customers who need very specific mapping images and data.”
Mapillary is one the players in a rapidly evolving and diversify competitive landscape for mapping. As autonomous vehicles, drones, delivery vehicles, and other forms of mobility gain traction, each often has specific mapping needs in terms of the type of data and the pace of updates required. The result is a massive hunger for mapping data.
The company is based in Malmö, Sweden and also has an R&D facility in Graz, Austria. Last year, it raised a $15 million round of venture capital to accelerate its development of an independent mapping data system for autonomous vehicles. Mapillary is already seeing its data used by partners such as the Volkswagen Group and mapping service HERE.
While Mapillary’s data continues to grow, there is still large gaps in coverage. It wouldn’t make sense for the company to go out and hire teams to gather the data. In part, such services like Mapillary are trying to reinvent the costly models using by services like Google Maps which sent out large fleets of vehicles to gather street-level imagery and data.
The marketplace is designed to address that. Customers needing map data can post requests Mapillary Marketplace, including descriptions of the location and the potential budget. Drivers can accept a project, gather the data through the app, and then get paid. For the moment, the service is just available for the U.S. and Europe.
For the moment, Mapillary won’t make any money from the marketplace. Rather, the benefit for the company is that the data collected for these projects also goes to its central service. Among the way that data gets used, Mapillary has a partnership with Amazon Rekognition, a visual data analysis platform, to create a system that makes it easier to find parking in congested areas.Through a partnership with Amazon’s
Once in the system, its computer vision helps identify specific objects like stop signs, utility poles, and fire hydrants.