Mappo
Make every trip a fascinating cultural journey
MAPPO is a first-of-its kind content platform, which already operates in cooperation with the world‘s leading car manufacturers - FORD, VW Group; MERCEDES; RENAULT; GM.
307% of funding target
By: Deddi Zucker
Successfully fundedAngel Investment
Investment type:
Company Stage:
Category:
Transportation
Highlights
Highlights
A Unique algorithm offering cultural geo-based content worldwide
Mappo has developed an exclusive algorithm to automatically scan huge databases of cultural content (songs, TV series, books, online content etc.) and extract related geographic locations. Mappo currently offers about 100,000 content points worldwide and intends to cover most of Western Europe and North America by mid-2023.
Meeting these content points is a magical moment in the consumer's experience: "The song was written about this place", "the author lived in this building", "the final scene of the series was filmed exactly in this alley". Imagine the experience of discovering a city or region - through all the cultural highlights it has to offer.
In addition, in order to diversify and deepen the user experience, Mappo's algorithm can generate location-based trivia questions. In a consumer study conducted in Tuscany in April 2022, 86% of users from different cultures and countries indicated this feature as their favorite. By mid-2023, Mappo will offer 500K trivia questions worldwide.
Following significant boost in business development in recent months, the company is about to launch its product in additional collaborations, which represent significant achievements, with leading global manufacturers Ford, Volkswagen Group, Mercedes, Renault and General Motors, among others.
In Addition, Mappo holds a technological approval from five additional car manufacturers - TOYOTA; MAZDA; SUZUKI; MITSUBISHI; SUBARU (which produce 18 million cars per year, combined.
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Signed cooperation with SPOTIFY and distribution agreement with HERE WeGo
As part of its product development, Mappo recently signed a cooperation agreement with SPOTIFY, the world's largest music and podcast platform, to jointly offer a content package (bundle) for car brands in the Volkswagen Group. This will allow Mappo to gain critical access to Spotify's vast database, in order to match suitable content (music and podcasts) for customers in their specific locations, in a cooperation which will also allow to easily streamline copyright issues worldwide.
Additionally, MAPPO has signed a distribution agreement with HERE WeGo - the world's leading location platform. HERE was acquired by an unbelievable partnership of Mercedes- Audi- Volkswagen, and creates navigation maps for the automotive industry. HERE navigation supplies more navigation applications than Google Maps.
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Global FORD campaign about Mappo – Operation launched in the U.S.
During 2020, a global campaign about the activity of Mappo in the U.S. and the UK was initiated by FORD. The main reason for the campaign is the utmost trust FORD has in Mappo’s product and a future vision of the unique system as one which will differ from other INFOTAINMENT systems worldwide. This achievement might contribute to the ongoing increase in FORD’s car sales around the world, according to FORD’s marketing department. As a result of this campaign, Mappo will gain an unprecedented global exposure and high demand from the main actors in the global car market. The company’s operation will focus on central main and geographical areas in the U.S., including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Highway 1, Florida, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, and additional locations. In Europe, the company focuses on the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The broad deployment of Mappo across the USA and U.K. will start with 30,000 content points and will reach more than 500,000 content points by the end of 2023.
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Strategic agreement with HARMAN-SAMSUNG
Mappo has a strategic agreement with SAMSUNG-HARMAN (HARMAN CARDON’s manufacturer). The company sells tens of millions of INFOTAINMENT systems every year to various manufacturers. The agreement will allow Mappo to dominate additional gigantic markets, in addition to its successful existing current partnerships.
Volkswagen Group
The Volkswagen Group, the largest automobile group in the world, established a subsidiary company called Cariad three years ago. The company has 4500 employees and is aimed at developing the next generation in the world of transport, while incorporating the most advanced technologies in the field.
The company is the development arm for all of the group's brands - Audi, Porsche, Seat, Skoda, Volkswagen, Bugatti and Scania.
In September 2022, Mappo signed a strategic agreement with the Volkswagen Group to launch the company's flagship product, designed for the next generation operating system, Android Automotive. The product will be launched during 2023 in collaboration with two super brands within the group - Audi and Porsche. This launch is a business breakthrough that further exemplifies Mappo's unique and superior solution for car manufacturers' deep need for location-based content.
Current Status - Overall Picture
Customers
Partners
Technological platforms
Development of cutting-edge third generation system with leading researchers
The company has two significant technological "anchors":
1. An exclusive AI engine that was developed by leading researchers in their field, Prof. Aric Shamir and Dr. Kfir Bar, along with the company's AI team.
2. A unique application for use in the media system in the car, which transforms the huge content pool that is fed by the AI system and turns it into an audio channel that makes experiencing the content in the car unique.
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Winning multiple lucrative contests: #MICHELIN# FORD #Paris Municipality #IMPACT- EU
- Already in its early days the company has won, with 22 additional startups, a competition held by the Paris municipality. Mappo (in its former name- BooksOnMap) was installed over hundreds of touch screens in bus stations across Paris.
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- Alongside 20 other startups around the world, the company has won the lucrative Michelin Movin’On 2018 competition held in March 2018 in Montreal, Canada.
- In November 2018, the company won second place in FORD’s European competition. According to a focus group operated by FORD during the competition, Mappo was named the most popular startup.
- During 2019-2020 Mappo has participated in the EU IMPACT project. During the program, the company was tested by all the large car companies operating in Europe. Roughly 400 startups in the field of transportation have started the program, and at the end of the project, the company was elected as one of the 18 distinguished startups in Europe in the automotive industry for 2019.
- The EU composed a list of promising startups for 2018 and 2019:
Pitch
Pitch
Problem and Solution
As the world's roads become more and more congested, travel times are getting longer, and car manufacturers are eager for new content solutions to improve the car experience for passengers and turn travel time from a waste to a meaningful experience.
Mappo’s content improves the riding experience. The company supplies audio and video In-car Infotainment for the automotive industry.
Mappo supplies family, geo-localized content - audio and video- for car manufacturers, that moves as the car rides.
The next big media revolution will arrive in the form of the in-car system. Following mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches - all car manufacturers and tech leaders are now aimed eagerly at the car's media screens.
A dramatic shift in business model for car manufacturers: the car's media screen represents the financial future of car manufacturers, as they are shifting the focus of their business from a model of revenue based on car sales and repairs - to services provided based on a monthly payment (subscription) model.
The Stelantis Group (Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Jeep Lancia and others) estimates that by 2030 about 30% of its revenue will arrive from in-car software.
GM estimates that by 2030 its total revenues from software will be billion dollars times its revenues today.
Mappo's distinguishing and huge advantage in this competitive environment is its scalability. In order to create millions of points of content, hundreds of thousands of human working hours are required. The fact that Mappo creates content based not on man-hours, but instead using an artificial intelligence engine to locate and deliver content, makes it an ideal partner for global automotive companies looking for technological solutions to cover every corner of the world.
With its algorithm, Mappo can supply these needs to every car manufacturer anywhere around the world.
Mappo is the first company in the world that uses all types of cultural content created along human history, to extract maps out of them. The company’s raw materials are a gigantic database of cultural content: books (history, children literature, cooking books, novels, architecture etc.), music (from the Beatles in England to Aznavour in Paris and even songs about the Kinneret), movies (Experience ‘Rocky’ on top of Philadelphia’s map) or TV shows (Breaking Bad in Albuquerque or House of Cards in Washington D.C.).
The company creates, with the algorithm developed by the company, geo-based content maps.
The company’s cutting-edge algorithm can “read” extremely broad texts, extract quotes that mention a specific location, and place them as a map layer.
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1. IN-CAR INFOTAINMENT market
This already huge existing market is undergoing significant growth, each year. The dramatic changes which the automotive sector is undergoing have created a new field which the market is now developing intensively: in-car infotainment. According to a report by ResearchAndMarkets 2018, the infotainment market is expected to nearly double its size by 2023 (mainly via tools meant for navigation, radio and maps).
Mappo supplies the tourist unique content: It is not Wikipedia-style content but tailor-made content in formats like stories, literature, architecture, content for children, food, history, or music that results into a unique experience. The digital world has thousands of tourism apps supplying information but there is no application in the world that supplies an experience like Mappo learned and can supply.
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Influence over the In-car Infotainment
Mappo supplies car manufacturers with a product that meets their needs: 1 – new market opportunities 2 – branding 3 – differentiation, 4 – family content. The usage of cultural content over the car’s screens and sound system completely changes the riding experience and it has the potential to change the revenue model of car manufacturers that currently operate with tight profit margins. Mappo’s product contributes to the change of the product’s definition manufacturers offer to their clients. This innovative product will place the manufacturer, in addition to the car itself, as an innovative, user -friendly company offering a family experience.
Mappo knows how to equip each city in the world, in no time, with local content. Moreover, the company will be able to sell data for municipalities or local tourism companies. It is worth mentioning that prior to the decision to focus on the car industry, the company has worked with the Barcelona-based company TURISME and has supplied its hundreds of thousands of customers with dedicated excursion plans created by Mappo.
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Technology
The company has developed a global platform, which enables to connect all types of content (texts, songs, TV shows dialogues, movies) and their location, based on where they occur. This connection creates an extensive database, including content-based maps with multiple points of interest (POI).
This database creates a layer over a digital map – both within the app and on the website. This layer is created by a unique GEO-REFERENCING algorithm. It is important to mention that it is a significant technological challenge, including the analysis of the texts, extracting the locations, and accurately placing them over the map.
How does it work?
Mappo's platform is a generic system embedded in the car's multimedia systems. Android Automotive OS is the world's leading system in this field and according to estimates it will be installed on 70% of all vehicles in the world, by 2027. Mappo is one of the only content companies in the world to think in a "car-first" model, and therefore, ahead of the widespread deployment of this operating system, the company has already developed two different versions for it - so it is in fact several years ahead of any competitors in the market.
In addition, Mappo's car app is compatible with other systems such as Apple car, Android Auto, SDL, and more. The system is adapted for integration with multimedia systems by several manufacturers such as Ford, Audi, Toyota, Suzuki, Subaru and Mitsubishi, as well as for use in the systems of Tier 1 companies such as Here, Herman, Faurcia and more. This adjustment allows systems to meet the safety standards as well, and provide an improved and safe user experience to the end customers.
The API created by the company allows its business customers to consume geographic content through a REST API, and integrate it into their websites and applications, for the purposes of creating content automatically and on demand, according to the customer's needs. The uniqueness of Mappo is its ability to produce global and culturally rich content on a large scale: the system allows the production of 5,000 POIs per month, and already today offers 86,000 POIs, of which 2,000 combine music and videos, as well as 250 itineraries for journeys based on cultural assets, such as 'Pinocchio' in Italy, Woody Allen's films in Brooklyn and more.
The system is available in 5 language: including English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.
Products and technologies that already exist
1. Geo-Referencing engine (English): The company has developed an engine which is able to process texts, recognize high-resolution location pins (a street, a site, a monument, a neighborhood, a building, a city, a district, a country) with a well-trained model for texts in a variety of genres. The engine is able to analyze entire books in English and place location pins over the Earth’s map with 90% accuracy.
2. Data API: A secured content distribution and clients’ management system for B2B customers who can get the content produced by the company for various avenues and usages within their own product.
3. Management, demonstration and tagging of content: The system enables editors to watch the content created by the engine, review it and tag it, to improve and contribute to the engine’s learning and to extract any irrelevant content. With the system, it is possible to build databases that can improve the engine and create autonomous learning through AI neural networks.
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Saliency: The company has become aware of the fact that the current algorithm ‘extracts’ phrases which some will not interest the end-user. The company acknowledges that a more subtle, distinct, and sophisticated work is needed.
The main target is to achieve significant technological development that understands the text and enables to choose phrases and to rank them according to their importance in the text and the level of interest they generate. By accomplishing this goal, the company will be able to precisely sort and choose only ‘interesting’ data and every text including the mentioning of a location, without distinguishing the level of interest it will generate.
It is the toughest technological challenge the company has taken upon itself. This operation is led by two scientists from IDC Herzliya: Prof. Ariel Shamir, Dean of Efi Arazi school of Computer Science and Dr. Kfir Bar, a world-class expert for NLP. This operation brings Mappo to operate within the AI sphere.
The ability to “understand” a text and to choose outstanding phrases is at the forefront of NLP. A success in this unique domain may bring the company an extraordinary value and a great technological edge.
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- The technological development creates a potential for two patents: 1 Geo-Referencing; 2 - (and the most promising!) - Saliency and 3 – Customization and personalized routes per user.
Patents
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1 |
saliency text extraction |
The patent is part of the core technology used by the product |
| 2 | Automatic generation of geo-based trivia questions |
The patent is part of the core technology used by the product |
Team
Team
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Over 20 years of experience in the Israeli high-tech scene. Served as VP of business development in Elbit, Head of Sales at Motorola Israel, lead sales, held BD and senior R&D management roles, led Motorola Ventures Israel. Has served as a member of the board of directors of various start-ups and now serves as chairman of the board of several start-ups.
Holds an EMBA from Northwestern Kellogg, Physics & Mathematics degrees from Tel Aviv University and Electrical Engineering degree from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
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Deddi is a former Member of Knesset and has expertise in many areas of digital content such as video, text, TV, and radio. Deddi was the founder and CEO of 360, a digital production company, which owned three cable channels and produced digital content for Israeli websites, including Ynet. After that, he was the founder of Learni, a software company that converted learning and teaching processes to digital content on mobile devices. Dedi holds a bachelor‘s degree in economics, a master‘s degree in political science (with honors) and studied for a doctorate in history. Deddi has extensive experience and in-depth knowledge of the automotive and infotainment industry, acquired during his years as CEO of Mappo. This experience includes connections with various parties in the industry, including car manufacturers and Tier 1 companies, as well as a thorough understanding of the needs, difficulties and methods of operation in this industry.
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Prof. Ariel Shamir served as dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, and as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Computational Imaging at the University of Texas in Austin, was a guest scientist at the research laboratories of Mitsubishi Electric in Cambridge MA (2006), and at Disney Research & MIT (2014). His areas of research and specialization include image and video processing, geometric modeling, computer graphics, manufacturing, visualization and machine learning. Prof. Shamir has extensive experience working with technological companies in the field of AI, including Paeon Medical, PrimeSence, Quantum Discoveries, Verisk, Donde Search, and more. Prof. Shamir has a bachelor‘s and master‘s degree in mathematics and computer science with honors and a Ph.D in computer science, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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A technical manager in leading Hi-Tech companies, focusing on people, product and SW development. An experienced innovative leader who understands the bigger picture and the minute details. 15 years of experience with managing complex international projects employing advanced technologies in a global environment.
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Dr. Bar is an AI expert with about 20 years of experience and in-depth knowledge of a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) disciplines, including statistical machine translation, name entity recognition and digital-human applications. He has extensive experience in combining linguistic knowledge with sophisticated algorithmic AI, to extract the most important information from text. Dr. Bar currently serves as a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Colman and IDC, where he teaches courses in computer science, digital humanities, machine learning and natural language processing. Before Mappo, Dr. Bar served as Chief Scientist at Basis Technology, a company that provides software solutions for text analysis, data retrieval, digital fraud detection and business intelligence. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO at Comprendi, a platform that turns big data into business insights, and CTO at Intuview, a company that developed an "artificial intuition" system for security uses. Dr. Bar has a PhD in computer science from Tel Aviv University, following his thesis on semantics and machine translation, titled "Producing paraphrases for highly biased languages, with a focus on machine translation”. He has a bachelor‘s and master‘s degree in computer science.
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Yens has 18 years of experience in the field of product management, including 7 years at Google, with expertise in UX and product design and processes in various platforms such as vehicles, mobile devices, internet/cloud platforms, and television. Before Mappo, Yens served as a product and UX manager at Amdocs, as a product manager at Waze and Google, and as a product manager for the automotive sector at Intuition Robotics. Before that, he held several positions as product manager and product team manager in several technology companies such as Fjorg, Kenshoo, and pixelpark. He has a bachelor‘s degree in digital communication.
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Yuval has 20 years of experience in managing marketing in various channels, business development, forming business partnerships, and building marketing, sales and go to market strategies. Before Mappo, Yuval held several senior positions at Gitam BBDO, the largest marketing firm in Israel, first as VP of Customer Service and then as joint CEO. Before that, he served as Deputy CEO at Y&R Israel, and Innovation Manager at La Mark vision.
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Danit is an algorithmist at Mappo, specializing in the development of learning models and NLP. She has experience in designing and developing algorithms for natural language processing systems, locating and implementing the suitable algorithms and tools for NLP tasks, and finding suitable datasets. Before Mappo, Danit served as an analyst at IDF’s 8200 unit. After her service, she worked as a developer of NLP algorithms at Melingo. Danit has a B.Sc degree in computer science and linguistics (Hebrew University) and is currently studying for a master‘s degree in NLP computer science (Bar-Ilan University).
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Itamar has a deep knowledge of various models and algorithms in the field of machine learning, neural networks and deep learning. As part of his role at Mappo, Itamar develops learning-based solutions for natural language processing algorithms. Before Mappo, Itamar served as a research assistant in the field of deep learning at the College of Management. He holds a bachelor‘s degree in electronics engineering.
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