Hivemapper is 1M kilometers closer to goal of beating Google Maps

Hivemapper relied on ride-hail, delivery and truck drivers with dash cams to collect 1 million unique kms of fresh map data.

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 over the last three months. It took Google from 2007 to 2019 to collect 16.1 million kilometers of unique road data.

Now the startup aims to map 10 million unique road kilometers by early next year.

Hivemapper relies on individual contributors around the world to collect its street-view data, rather than spending millions of dollars putting dedicated mapping vehicles on the road. Its dashcams are equipped with a high-quality imager and precise GPS, and they go for $549. Mapping with dashcams, the company says, means its data is continuously being refreshed, whereas much of Google’s Street View imagery, particularly outside of urban centers, is over a decade old.