Hyperlocal startup Nextbillionai uses an AI-first for enabling location-based experiences

The capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) are to boost enterprise efficiencies worldwide. But, lack of customisation sometimes act as a barrier when it comes to large-scale adoption. It is an Singapore-headquartered AI-powered startup Nextbillionai, it aims to deliver a good range of hyperlocal solutions starting with the area of mapping and moving on to NLP, content moderation, and even facial recognition.

It was founded in 2020 by Ajay Bulusu, Gaurav Bubna, and Shaolin Zheng. Its basic aims is to become the global leader in AI-powered hyperlocal solutions and serve the billion users. These founders met at Grab, the Singapore-headquartered multinational ride-hailing company, and thereby realised that there was such much to be done with mapping technology.

“At Grab, we were leading the maps team and built the technology literally from the ground up. During this time, we realised that there were many other challenges and the problems were global,” Ajay says.

Nextbillionai though to work on an AI-driven mapping technology platform, which will be easy to use, and highly customised for enterprises or businesses.

“Companies today generate a lot of data through various sources; we take certain components of this and apply our proprietary technology,” Ajay says.

Gaurav also gaved an example of a situation where the roads were narrow and some vehicles cannot pass. A conventional map platform will probably not take this into consideration, but technology built by Nextbillionai will take care of these insights based on customer data.

“This indicates that we are building something good as many of our customers in the US have already started pilot projects,” Ajay says. The startup funds $7 A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.