Briefly
- Lyft has confirmed it’s sourcing street-level mapping information from Bee Maps, a Hivemapper-powered decentralized platform.
- The partnership started in 2024 and helps Lyft’s navigation and autonomous automobile initiatives.
- Decrypt understands the deal entails licensing information solely, with no contribution from Lyft drivers or their autos.
Lyft has partnered with Bee Maps, a decentralized mapping platform constructed on Hivemapper infrastructure, to assist its inner mapping efforts, the corporate has confirmed to Decrypt.
The rideshare agency started working with Bee Maps in 2024 and is utilizing the platform’s street-level mapping information to assist enhance routing and navigation because it expands its autonomous automobile technique.
Bee Maps publicly introduced the connection in a weblog submit on Wednesday, describing Lyft as a buyer of its crypto-incentivized mapping community.
The buyer-facing mapping product is constructed on prime of Hivemapper, a decentralized, crypto-incentivized map-building community that runs on Solana.
The platform depends on a world community of contributors who add avenue imagery through AI-powered dashcams, rewarding them with its native HONEY token.
“Lyft acknowledged that old-school mapping could not sustain with the actual world,” Ariel Seidman, co-founder and CEO of Bee Maps, stated within the submit. “For mobility to work and for autonomy to change into actuality, maps cannot be an afterthought—they should be crowdsourced, reside, correct, and open.”
Whereas Bee Maps has promoted the usage of crowdsourced information from drivers, Decrypt understands that Lyft’s partnership is restricted to licensing mapping information and doesn’t contain Lyft drivers or their autos contributing to the platform.
Lyft has beforehand invested in open-source mapping by way of contributions to OpenStreetMap, and the Bee Maps partnership factors to its continued push towards extra versatile and real-time mapping methods, impartial of legacy suppliers.
Phrases of the deal between the pair weren’t disclosed.
Logan Hitchcock contributed to reporting.
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