Toyota Leads $500M Round For Startup Momenta

Momenta is now the recipient of a $500 million investment round led by Toyota in order to provide new technologies like automated HD mapping and updates through vision-based technologies, a company announcement says. Both companies are looking to promote their new Toyota Automated Mapping platform for Chinese customers. Momenta specializes in vision-based, or camera-based, HD mapping, which utilizes camera, GPS and IMU to automatically generate HD maps. The maps are of a high quality through cutting-edge technologies like "deep-learning based perception, SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), etc.," and come with rich geometry features like traffic signs, poles, lane borders, traffic lights and road markings. In addition, the tech generates road-level and lane topology and semantic features.