Toyota's Woven Planet has acquired HD mapping startup Carmera. Woven Planet which is developing future-facing technologies like autonomous driving has acquired Carmera for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will augment its portfolio of autonomous driving tech especially after its acquisition of Lyft's autonomous driving unit called Level 5 for which it paid $550 million. Nvidia recently made a similar deal when it acquired DeepMap back in June. DeepMap and Carmera fundamentally do the same thing, they use the cameras on the car to update maps in real-time in great detail and nuance providing the context of time, environment, traffic, weather and road conditions.
The 50-people team of Carmera will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Woven Planet, though it will maintain its officers in New York and Seattle, though eventually, an integration with Woven Planet will happen. Woven Planet, of course, has a much larger team of 1,000 people that is still growing and its CEO is James Fuffner.
Carmera's tech creates maps for autonomous vehicles using their own LiDARs and cameras in real time
This way Carmera will become the US outpost of Woven Planet's automated mapping platform which is headquartered in Tokyo. Ro Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of Carmera will report to Mandali Khalesi who leads the automated mapping platform unit at Woven Planet.
Carmera was launched in 2015 when It had a barter business and it used data collected from a service it provides for free to commercial fleet operators to maintain and expand its primary mapping product. Its main and initial mapping product was developed for autonomous car industry stakeholders like automakers, suppliers and robot taxis.
It counts Cruise by way of its Voyage acquisition as a major customer. Apart from this Baidu's open-source Apollo mapping project counts Carmera as a customer.
