Woven Planet Holdings Acquires Carmera

Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings has purchased HD mapping startup Carmera for an unknown sum. Woven Planet Holdings was formed to invest in, develop, and eventually bring future transportation technologies like automated driving to market. The news comes less than two months after Holdings paid $550 million for Lyft’s driverless vehicle subsidiary, Level 5.

It also comes on the heels of Nvidia’s acquisition of DeepMap, which was revealed in June. Carmera will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of as part of the agreement. According to Woven Planet CEO James Kuffner, the startup’s 50-person staff will keep their offices in New York and Seattle and will eventually be absorbed into Woven Planet 1,000-person-and-growing organization.

Woven Planet automated mapping platform (AMP) team based in Tokyo will essentially set up shop in Carmera. Mandali Khalesi, the CEO of AMP, will report to Ro Gupta, the co-founder, and CEO of Carmera. Carmera began operations in 2015 with a barter-style revenue strategy that relies on data gathered from a free service it offers commercial fleet operators to maintain and improve its principal mapping product.

Carmera’s first and most important offering is a high-definition map created for autonomous car customers such as OEMs, suppliers, and robotaxis. Voyage, an autonomous vehicle startup acquired by Cruise this year, was an early Carmera customer. Baidu also employed Carmera’s technology to support the open-source Apollo mapping project.To keep that AV maps up to date, the company leverages data from its fleet-monitoring service product. Professional fleets who wish to control risk and increase safety with their cars and drivers utilize the fleet solution, a telematics and video monitoring service.