UNL, a Singapore-based firm that provides micro-location and mapping technologies, has announced a pre-Series A funding round of US $4.5 million.
Existing shareholder HERE Technologies, a navigation and mapping location platform owned by a partnership of German carmakers Audi, BMW, and Daimler, led the round.
Returning investors include Singapore’s Elev8.vc, SGInnovate, and Venturerock, as well as deep-tech backers Elev8.vc, SGInnovate, and Venturerock.
Fernando Herrera, the creator of Nordcloud, a European cloud service business, also contributed.
The money will go toward expanding UNL’s operations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In these areas, the business will focus on tackling last-mile and logistics concerns, beginning with improving addressing, geocoding, and dynamic routing accuracy and precision.
This agreement comes more than a year after UNL was awarded a US$2 million grant in 2020.
UNL, which was founded in 2018, provides a library of plug-and-play geospatial technologies to assist businesses in developing scalable, hyper-local services and apps, ranging from e-commerce to last-mile and smart city solutions.
To put it another way, UNL pixelizes the actual world into a multi-resolution smart grid to give each site a digital and verified address — UNL geoID — that works similarly to an IP address. UNL geoIDs are unusual in that they map out and address locations with an accuracy of up to 11 cm2, spanning outdoor, interior, and elevation.
This technology may be integrated into any stage of the supply chain, allowing for better circulation of products from supplier to vendor to end-user while also allowing clients to navigate enormous facilities.
“[UNL] can solve some of the biggest hyperlocal challenges that traditional mapping hasn’t been able to do so far — starting with accuracy and precision in mapping, addressing, real-time routing and self-healing maps,” said Founder and CEO Xander van der Heijden.
In the near future, UNL wants to develop a cloud-based visual editor that will allow businesses to construct unique virtual private maps and manage microservices and points of interest (POI) data without having to code. These real-time updates may be integrated with current business applications including driver apps, order management systems, and fleet management systems.
The UNL MAppStore will soon have ready-to-use applications accessible.
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