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Bee Maps has raised $32 million to scale its DePIN mapping network, with Pantera Capital, LDA Capital, Borderless Capital and Ajna Capital participating in the round. Hivemapper, Inc. now operates under the brand name Bee Maps.
Alongside the raise, Bee Maps is introducing a new subscription-based “Bee Membership” to improve accessibility for contributors. Instead of paying $589 upfront for the Bee LTE device, drivers in the US can now get hardware, LTE connectivity and Beekeeper fleet software bundled for $19 per month on a 24-month term.
Hivemapper CEO Ariel Seidman frames the network’s challenge as one of supply rather than demand. The funding is earmarked to quickly expand coverage and scale contributor rewards so Bee Maps can meet a backlog of enterprise needs across navigation, automotive and city planning.
The company’s go-to-market momentum has grown through a string of notable customers in the past year.
Bee Maps announced in May that ride-hailing company Lyft was sourcing real-time, crowdsourced street-level data to improve routing and support its autonomous strategy, while Volkswagen’s autonomous vehicle unit was revealed in July to be leveraging Bee Maps for robotaxi mapping data.
Bee Maps’ site also highlights media and mapping companies like NBCUniversal, Mapbox and HERE (formerly Nokia HERE) among users of its technology.
CEO Ariel Seidman tells me: “These aren’t small pilots; some of these are six and seven-figure deals,” noting that interest from those companies is driven by Bee’s ability to deliver data they can’t obtain elsewhere.
Companies “want broader coverage, especially in smaller markets like Des Moines. Dropping the Bee price from a $500 upfront cost to $19 a month changes who can participate. It turns this from a niche device into something anyone can deploy anywhere.”
Built on the Hivemapper Network, Bee Maps uses an edge-based AI pipeline to convert contributor imagery into dynamic map features.
By bootstrapping the supply side of the network with token rewards, Hivemapper is able to produce fresher map data at about a faster rate of 5-6x than those supplied by incumbents like Google Maps and Apple Maps that traditionally rely on infrequent fleet surveys to refresh data.
According to Hivemapper official data, the network has mapped 644 million km of roads in total, including 21 million km in unique roadway.
Source: Hivemapper
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