3D-mapping startup launches, announces $6.4 million round

An ambitious 3D-mapping company intended to be used for autonomous cars launched earlier this week, announcing a $6.4 million Series A round.

Brooklyn-based Carmera attaches 3D cameras to vehicle fleets (MakeSpace is currently the company’s primary beta user) to help the fleets traverse the streets, but also, and more importantly, to build up data on how streets look on the ground, rather than from a satellite.

“The problem is, autonomous vehicle mapping data tends to be non-existent, not good enough, or what little exists gets locked up in a few closed platforms,” the company wrote in a Medium post Monday. “We built Carmera to fix this.”

“Our Investment in CARMERA” … Brooklyn’s very own autonomous vehicle startup – https://t.co/A8HH7WwOex cc: @ro_gupta @potatono

— Notation (@notationcapital) June 5, 2017

The company has Brooklyn roots everywhere. It was founded by Ro Gupta, who is CEO, and Justin Day, who is CTO. Day formerly worked as CTO of Brooklyn 3D-printing company Makerbot. Makerbot’s founder, Bre Pettis, is also one of the investors in Carmera, but he’s not the only one from Brooklyn. Notation Capital also joined in the round, which was led by Matrix Partners.

“We first met Ro in 2014 through Jake Levine, one of our part-time partners at Notation,” Notation Capital wrote in their own Medium post on Monday. “Ro was coming off a 6 year stint as head of business development at Disqus, and had been tinkering nights and weekends with a home brewed road intelligence product installed on his own car. Shortly afterwards, Ro moved into our first office with us on top of Threes Brewing in Brooklyn, and as he continued to explore the intersection of 3D mapping data and autonomous vehicles, we all became increasingly excited about the emerging opportunity.”

It’s a great example of how overlapping networks in a tech scene can bring to fruition real companies tackling big problems.