The spatial intelligence company providing situational awareness to robots, drones, machines, and VR/AR headsets, Slamcore, has raised $16 million in Series A funding.

The company expects that its AI-powered localization and mapping tech will play a critical role in powering the self-navigating machines of the future, such as drones, vacuum cleaners, or warehouse picking-and-packing systems. Moreover, the growing applications of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets would require humans and machines to simultaneously map and navigate both real and virtual worlds, creating more opportunities for the company.

“For far too long, robots have not been able to navigate physical spaces with the level of accuracy and efficiency that we know is possible,” said Owen Nicholson, the company’s founder and CEO.

The London-based company has developed AI algorithms that answer three crucial questions for a moving machine – Where am I in 3D space? What are the objects around me? And where are the objects around me?

For instance, a warehouse incorporates several elements, such as people, objects, equipment, and more, that interact with each other to get the work done. It is exceedingly tricky for autonomous machines to understand such interactions, leading to major accidents. Therefore, simultaneous localization and mapping or SLAM is a well-known computational problem dealing with enabling autonomous systems to move around an environment without crashing onto each other.

Slamcore is solving the problem of generating accurate positional awareness through new environments by using data gathered from the machine to build maps of environments in real-time instead of traditional tracking and mapping methods. The company harnesses the sensor data from lidar, sonar, radar, and more within ‘real-time spatial understanding’ and delivers it through a software development kit (SDK).

While the company is a software and AI company at its core, it has much scope for developing applications for the hardware being used by companies operating in the robotics or AR/VR space.

Slamcore had previously raised around $11 million, and with the fresh $16 million in the bank, the company is well-positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities in the sector with its ‘proven technology.’

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