Vangrid, a Dutch startup developing a decentralised spatial intelligence network to be deployed on smartphones, has raised $9 million in seed funding.
Vangrid's goal is to make high-fidelity spatial data accessible at the scale and frequency Physical AI actually demands, without requiring dedicated capture hardware. The platform activates the cameras and sensors already in billions of smartphones, turning ordinary phones into a distributed capture network.
This zero-hardware format allows everyday users, not just fleets of specialised vehicles, to generate continuously updated ground-truth data, taking a street or city from uncaptured to enterprise-ready in the time it takes to walk through it.
Vangrid sits between two extremes: legacy mapping methods that rely on slow, expensive, centrally-owned vehicle fleets, and open crowdsourcing efforts that lack verification and enterprise-grade quality. It gives contributors a direct path to compensation and gives customers verified, provenance-tracked data they can trust. With Vangrid, the network scales at the speed of app downloads, not procurement cycles, and is built for continuous, real-time refresh, not a one-time capture.
The onchain verification and edge-computation layer is central to delivering on this promise at scale. Faces and license plates are blurred on-device before any data leaves the phone, and each capture is verified onchain for provenance before reaching the enterprise spatial API.
