[Funding Alert] Nextbillionai Raises $7 Mn Series A Fund From Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital Nextbillionai is currently working with brands in social media, ride-hailing, food delivery, freight and logistics spaces across the US, India, Southeast Asia and China

Diversified enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platform Nextbillionai on Thursday announced it has raised a $7 million Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.

With this investment, Nextbillionai has on-boarded Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed and Navroz Udwadia, co-founder and partner of Falcon Edge Capital, to the board of directors.

Nextbillionai is currently working with brands in social media, ride-hailing, food delivery, freight and logistics spaces across the US, India, southeast Asia and China.

Founded in 2020 by Ajay Bulusu, Gaurav Bubna and Shaolin Zheng, Nextbillionai provides AI-based hyperlocal solutions in areas such as mapping, NLP, content moderation and facial recognition.

Commenting on the new investment, Bulusu, co-founder of Nextbillionai, said, "Emerging markets across the world are far more complex—with different languages, cultures, hyperlocal nuances and densely populated cities—than the developed markets. We see opportunity in these complexities. With our first product Nextbillionmaps, we are building intuitive and intelligent location AI-platform using open-source data combined with proprietary client data that makes logistics, transport, ride-hailing, delivery, e-commerce solutions accessible to the next billion users effectively, efficiently and affordably. We quickly intend to expand into multiple verticals delivering world-class AI-powered solutions to our customers."

Speaking on the latest development, Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed Ventures, said, "The opportunity in solving hyperlocal challenges is huge, and mapping is just one of them. We at Lightspeed are excited by the prospect of partnering with this team as they build a range of turnkey enterprise solutions around maps, facial AI and NLP to address the needs of the next billion consumers both in developing and developed markets."

"Nextbillionai team brings in world-class expertise in creating enterprise mapping solutions, at scale. We are confident they will build customisable, scalable and effective hyperlocal mapping solutions tailored towards the needs of emerging markets across the world, leveraging artificial intelligence and significant domain expertise" said Navroz Udwadia, co-founder and partner, Falcon Edge Capital.