San Francisco web3 company Hivemapper says it can do a better job mapping out the world's streets than even multibillion dollar companies like Google — and it has devised an innovative, if not complicated, way to get the process to work.
Instead of hiring drivers to ride around in cars loaded with expensive cameras a la Google Streetview, Hivemapper has devised an incentive structure to get the same job done more frequently by a decentralized community of ride-hailing drivers, map geeks and crypto enthusiasts.
Users can earn cryptocurrency by installing a 4K dashcam in their cars and taking high quality video of the streets as they drive. The cam sends the video to the users' cell phone through the Hivemapper app; it is later sent to the company when the phone has wi-fi access.
The company divides street maps into tiles that correspond with different values of the cryptocurrency honey. Drivers earn honey for each tile they drive through recording video; the transaction is logged on the blockchain for transparency.
Honey is currently trading at about $171 per coin. It's not clear how much money drivers can earn per mile as the value earned varies street by street, but it's being marketed as supplemental income for people already on the road.
Hivemapper just raised an $18 million Series A led by Multicoin Capital, bringing its total funding to $23 million. Craft Ventures, Solana Capital, Shine Capital and a number of big name tech executives such as Amir Haleem, the founder of Helium, also participated.
To scale the creation of its mapping system, Hivemapper is offering proprietary dashcams that can be preordered on its website for $449 that will be available in July. They will make it easier to upload video to the Hivemapper app.
Hivemapper CEO and co-founder Ariel Seidman worked as head of products at Yahoo Maps back when the company was still seriously competing with Google.
"Around 2006 Google was spending massive amounts of capital to gather data for its maps program," he told me. "I made a request to Yahoo for a couple hundred million to compete, but they gave us $20 million. So I'm like great, we can map out California, and we ended up getting our asses kicked."
He went on to spend his career devising new ways to disrupt Google's stranglehold on the map application market.
In 2010, he founded Gigwalker to use individual smartphones to build out local maps by allowing users to pick up jobs based on their location, but failed to scale the user base large enough to create a global map.
He founded Hivemapper in 2015 with the goal of using drones, but battery life and aviation regulations hindered scale of the project.
So finally, he has arrived on a Web3 model of getting a decentralized community of drivers spurred by a desire to earn cryptocurrency.
The app is very popular in the Philippines, a market already hot for play-to-earn video games that let players earn cryptocurrency while they play. Seidman says 70% of the streets in Manila are refreshed every month with up-to-date images from web cams, while 30% of Los Angeles gets refreshed.
"Even on the main street in Palo Alto by Google's headquarters, street view only gets updated a few times a year, while we can do it a few times a week at the same cost," he said.
The company is currently operating in nine metro markets, including San Francisco, and plans to expand to 30 by the second half of the year.
The company will earn revenue by selling its application programming interface to businesses in need of online maps, such as local governments, real estate firms and logistics companies. Google Maps has long dominated this market and has hiked prices in recent years. It's also under investigation by the Justice Department over whether bundling Google Maps into other Google services stifles competition.
"Web 2.0 companies took our data for free and gave us nothing in return," Seidman said. "If you contribute data to the map, you're owning part of the map and we can do that in a transparent way on the blockchain."
