Message from DeepMap’s Co-Founders James Wu and Mark Wheeler
Dear DeepMap colleagues, customers, partners, and supporters:
Today we are thrilled to announce that DeepMap has agreed to be acquired by NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA).
This is an incredibly exciting and transformational opportunity for our company and for the industry.
We founded DeepMap in 2016 because we saw a clear path leading to the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution. We realized early on that there was a huge unmet need for core mapping technology to support autonomy on a large scale.
In NVIDIA, we have found a partner who shares our vision.
NVIDIA is a world-class and highly-innovative company. Joining forces with…
Today we’re sharing with you a video of a free-flowing, unstructured conversation between analyst Grayson Brulte of Brulte & Company and Mark Wheeler, CTO and Co-Founder of DeepMap.
The discussion took place last week in conjunction with the DeepMap RoadMemory (tm) announcement.
Grayson zoomed in from sunny Palm Beach, Florida, while Mark zoomed in from beautiful Northern California. We’ve divided the ~17 minute interview into 7 parts, each posted on Youtube, with links provided below. For easy reading, we’ve included one quote from each part.
- Part 1 (2:28 mins)
Grayson: What is RoadMemory and why is it so important to DeepMap?
Mark…
Crunchbase has published an op-ed by DeepMap co-founders James Wu and Mark Wheeler on the opportunity for a new generation of smarter maps made for machines, by machines.
James and Mark explain that “historically, building high-definition maps was a large and expensive undertaking. Now, with newer mapping engine platforms that leverage state-of-the-art AI and mapping technology built from the ground up for machines, it is possible to create the large-scale, fresh, accurate, open and economical maps the transportation industry needs to truly advance to higher levels of autonomy.”
Excerpts:
In popular culture, autonomous vehicles (AVs) tend to be depicted as robotaxis traversing city streets, or self-driving cars racing down highways.
In fact, there are many other types of spaces where AV technology will be required — for example, privately-owned parking garages.
DeepMap has partnered with automakers around the world to build high-definition maps of complex, multi-level parking garages for automated valet parking (AVP). We’ve delivered centimeter-level-accuracy maps of the interiors, and helped customers align the maps to neighboring public streets.
We’ve also built maps of outdoor parking lots, which our CTO Mark Wheeler describes as “massive, complicated, unlabeled intersections.”
…
Question: What do these topics have in common?
- Lyft’s Level 5 and Toyota’s Woven Planet…
- John Krafcik leaving Waymo…
- Amazon acquisition of Zoox…
- Autonowashing…
Answer: All of these subjects were covered in a wide-ranging conversion between DeepMappers and Ed Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) this week. Ed is the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. He has a prolific track record in writing about and commenting on the automotive industry and currently serves as the head of comms at PAVE.
Ed started the discussion with an overview of PAVE, a coalition dedicated to educating the public about automated vehicles (AVs)…
Traditional navigation maps get us from Point A to B. Next-generation maps for autonomous vehicles (AVs), such as those developed by DeepMap, add increased safety to our travels.
In the second post in our Here Be Dragons series, we will outline some additional — and perhaps surprising — benefits of maps that you may not have thought about.
-Editor
PS: Each Here Be Dragons will highlight an ancient map from the David Rumsey Map Center. We met David through our COO, Wei Luo. Wei and David were co-interviewed for an a16z podcast, The Exploding Map, which we highly recommend.
Surprising Benefits of Maps for Autonomous Vehicles
By…
Our CTO Mark Wheeler recently joined students at the Harvard Business School for a session of the course Digital Transformation of Business, taught by Professor Shane Greenstein. The topic of the class was DeepMap: Charting the Road Ahead for Autonomous Vehicles, an HBS case study on DeepMap authored by Prof. Greenstein and Nicole Tempest Keller.
The lively class discussion focused on analyzing DeepMap use cases across robotaxis, last mile delivery, long-haul trucking, and mining/agriculture.
Prof. Greenstein encouraged the students to deliberate about DeepMap’s value proposition in the autonomous driving ecosystem, as well as challenges — such as how to determine…
Today DeepMap is launching a new blog post series called Here Be Dragons. In this series we will explore our love of maps, from the ancient maps on papyrus that guided ocean voyagers, to the digital, highly-detailed maps of today designed to be read by machines.
The phrase Here be Dragons (hic sunt dracones) called out to us as it is associated with unexplored territories on ancient maps. Please join us as we explore mapping topics relevant to the uncharted territory of autonomy. …
DeepMap has been recognized on the annual AI 100 ranking of the most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world. The AI 100 was selected from a pool of over 6,000 companies.
“This year’s cohort spans 18 industries, and is working on everything from climate risk to accelerating drug R&D,” said CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal. “Last year’s AI 100 companies had a remarkable run after being named to the list, with more than 50% going on to raise additional financing (totaling $5.2B), including 16 $100 million+ mega-rounds. Many also went on to exit via M&A, SPAC, or IPO…
DeepMap’s VP of Operations, Richard Lucquet, participated in a panel last week titled HD Maps: An AV’s World View.
It was sponsored by Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE), a coalition that informs the public about automated vehicles and their potential.
The panel was moderated by PAVE’s Ed Niedermeyer. Richard was joined by Sheila Nedelcu of HERE, Tal Babaioff of Mobileye, and Aaron Nathan of Point One.
“For humans, maps serve one major function: helping us understand where we are, where we want to go, and how to get there,” said Ed. …
DeepMap, Inc.
DeepMap is accelerating safe autonomy by providing the world’s best autonomous mapping and localization solutions.
