Carmera expands to Seattle

Brooklyn 3D mappers Carmera expanded to the west coast, opening a Seattle office, GeekWire reports. Five of the company’s 15 employees will work there.

The company produces 3D maps that update continuously. The technology is most likely to be used by autonomous vehicles that need reliable 3D maps to pair with sensors and GPS location data.

“Other than the Bay Area, no city in the US has as many top-notch software engineers with a background in maps due to the presence of Microsoft,” and several other mapping companies and startups, emailed Ethan Sorrelgreen, the chief product officer for Carmera. “Rather than going head-to-head with other autonomous vehicle companies recruiting mapping talent in the Bay Area, we wanted to provide a local option to Seattle based engineers to really get to work at a startup on the core AV software stack (as opposed to just sensors or at a big company).”

Sorrelgreen himself is based in Seattle.

Earlier in the summer we talked to Carmera’s cofounder and CEO Ro Gupta about what the company hopes to build.

“Every autonomous vehicle (AV) has to have real-time sensing and almost every single AV program also uses maps, because that gives them a recollection of the world around them and that allows them to confirm that what they’re seeing in real time matches with what’s on the map,” Gupta explained to Technical.ly in July. “The other benefit is to have information about what the vehicle can’t see yet, which might be a few blocks away or around a building, like a temporary road closure. It’s very useful to know about those things as far in advance as possible.”

Carmera raised $6.4 million in June, financed by Brooklyn’s Bre Pettis (of MakerBot fame) and Notation Capital, among others.

It could be shaping up to be a big year for autonomous vehicles. At least, that was Gupta’s prediction earlier this week, when he wrote his predicted headline for 2018 here in Technical.ly.