Crypto investment firm Multicoin is leading an $8 million purchase of GEOD tokens, a major capital injection into the crypto project building a hyper-accurate alternative to GPS.
Geodnet hails from crypto’s buzzy DePIN wing of startups that financially incentivise regular people to host their physical infrastructure. The project’s token (its incentive mechanism) has more than doubled in the past 12 months amid torrid demand for Geodnet’s services.
GPS satellites that tell your phone about how far you are from the next intersection are plenty good for a drive around town. Not so for Geodnet’s user base of farming drones and industrial robots, said project lead Mike Horton. They need location data down “to the size of a golf ball.”
Nearly 14,000 base stations provide centimeter-level location data to Geodnet’ clients, many of whom are oblivious to its crypto incentives: Anyone running a $700 base station earns new GEOD tokens, a model that shifts the normally astronomical cost of deploying equipment away from the company.
“Because of DePIN, we’ve been able to scale this thing crazy fast,” said Horton. “We built in two years what the industry has been working on for 20 years, and we now have twice as many stations as anyone else.”
Multicoin’s betting Geodnet’s cheap, all-encompassing geospatial network will help facilitate the explosive growth of technologies that need accurate location data, particularly robots: self-driving vehicles, delivery drones, autonomous farming equipment.
“For these robots to function, they need to answer a fundamental question: Where am I?, wrote Multicoin Investment Partner Shayon Sengupta in a position paper.
Geodnet’s existing customers are powering over $3 million in annual recurring revenue, said Horton. He’s targeting 2025 growth in India and South America, particularly in the farming sector.
The investors are calling the fundraise a “strategic” investment in which they bought GEOD tokens directly from Geodnet Foundation, the entity behind the network. Geodnet last raised capital in April 2024 from Coinfund, Pantera and VanEck.
“We’re raising the money to really focus on robots and drones,” Horton said.
