For San Francisco-based startup Level One Navigation, the worth of ‘location, location, location’ extends effectively past actual property. And traders appear to agree.

Level One Navigation, a startup that has developed exact location know-how, has simply raised $35 million in a Sequence C spherical led by Khosla Ventures. The corporate’s post-money valuation is now $230 million, in keeping with one insider conversant in the deal.

Level One, which was based in 2016, has developed exact location know-how that may be utilized to any car that strikes from autonomous shopper lawnmowers and drones to robots, shopper automobiles, agriculture gear, and even people donning a wearable machine.

For Level One, exact location means precisely that. The know-how, referred to as a positioning engine, can decide location inside 1 centimeter in the perfect circumstances, co-founder Aaron Nathan instructed TechCrunch.

To attain that, Level One has mixed an augmented international navigation satellite tv for pc system (GNSS), pc imaginative and prescient, and sensor fusion into an API. Sometimes that API is deployed as a software program product as a result of most new automobiles — like a slick EV or luxurious automotive — come geared up with the required {hardware}. For automobiles like farm gear or say a primary responder that don’t, Level One provides a chipset into the combination.

Level One began with a concentrate on automotive purchasers — an indication of the bullish autonomous car know-how occasions. That sector continues to make up a big slice of its income. Level One couldn’t disclose most of its business buyer names, but it surely did share that its know-how helps the superior driver help and infotainment wants of an EV maker and is included in additional than 150,000 of its automobiles.

Level One additionally has contracts with among the largest mowing and turf care producers, a distribution firm’s fleet of 300,000 last-mile supply automobiles, and a world producer of road and racing bikes.

However the startup started to department out to different sectors round 2021 when it introduced its $10 million Sequence A spherical, in keeping with Nathan. That helped kick adoption into excessive gear. Over the previous yr, the variety of producers utilizing Level One Navigation’s know-how platform has elevated tenfold and spans automotive, robotics, industrial, and wearable sectors.

“And now it’s simply accelerating,” Nathan stated.

Level One’s newest Sequence C spherical might be used to construct out all elements of its know-how, together with its so-called Polaris RTK Community — a key piece of {hardware} that helps ship centimeter-level accuracy even in sparsely populated areas North America, Europe, and Asia.

“The business retains urgent to larger precision, from precision agriculture to portray strains to mowing a yard,” Tom Weeks, the corporate’s COO instructed TechCrunch. “You possibly can’t be off by 10 centimeters and go over in a flower mattress. So the whole lot’s urgent to the one to a few centimeter vary.”

To get that sort of precision, Level One spent eight years creating its RTK Community, a system of small lunchbox-sized items, put in in safe places like a cellphone tower facility that gives corrections to location. To create a dense community, these stations have to be inside 40 kilometers of that car or machine’s location. Which means a number of stations, which the corporate is constructing out, Weeks stated.

“Midwestern states the place farming is occurring, all the way in which to the East Coast within the US, require strong density, as a result of you could have folks, you could have farming, you could have automobiles and vehicles, a number of middle-mile freight,” Weeks stated. “So we’re within the technique of filling that out; we’re virtually there.”

The startup can be working to beef up the know-how’s functionality indoors. Right now, automobiles touring from open air to an indoor parking construction will proceed to have that exact location. However Nathan needs to increase that functionality to industrial settings the place a robotic, for example, might spend the majority of its life inside.

“What we’re constructing subsequent — and that’s a part of what this fundraising for — is, how will we do long-term indoor navigation as effectively,” he stated. “Whenever you have a look at the evolution of the enterprise, we wish to clear up ubiquitous location, so finally it is going to be indoors and all domains.”