Hivemapper, the startup that puts dashcams on ride-hail and delivery vehicles to map the world, is getting a little closer to its goal of toppling the B2B mapping empire that Google has built.
With only 2% of the world’s roads mapped, Hivemapper is still very much the underdog in this fight. But Gabe Nelson, Hivemapper’s head of operations, reckons the startup is reaching an inflection point that will lead to exponential scale.
Hivemapper said Thursday it collected more than 1 million kilometers (about 620,000 miles) of unique street level imagery. Compared to Google’s 60 million kilometers, that’s small potatoes. However, Hivemapper collected this data within three months of launching. It took Google from 2007 to 2019 to collect 16.1 million kilometers of unique road data.
Now, the startup aims to map 10 mill...
