Facebook Inc. has acquired Mapillary AB, a Swedish startup that takes street-level imagery for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 2013, Mapillary pitches itself as a sort of Google Maps competitor in that it offers street-level imagery such as Google Maps does but with a twist in that its imagery comes from “any camera, anywhere.” The company claims to solve a problem with mapping by keeping maps updated with street-level data about signs, addresses and other information that can be observed from the road.

Specifically, the company data mines and crowdsources the images it uses to stitch them together into a three-dimension map.

Mapillary Chief Executive Officer Jan Erik Solem previously worked at Apple Inc. after selling his previous startup, Polar Rose, a facial recognition startup, to Apple in 2010.

According to Reuters, the data from Mapillary can be used for self-driving car technology, although Facebook said that it would be used to underpin its products under development, including augmented reality glasses and virtual reality headsets. In other words, the acquisition appears chiefly for Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality arm.

In a blog post today, Solem said Mapillary was joining Facebook as part of its “open mapping efforts.”

“At Mapillary, we’re building the tools for creating a living and visual representation of every place in the world, made available for anyone to update the maps they care about,” Solem said. “By merging our efforts, we will further improve the ways that people and machines can work with both aerial and street-level imagery to produce map data.”

While perhaps Facebook’s existing mapping service may work in the U.S., it’s awful in much of the rest of the world — at times reminiscent of MapQuest in the late 1990s. So if the acquisition of Mapillary improves that, it can’t be a bad thing for the company.

Mapillary had raised $24.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors included LDV Capital, Sequoia Capital, Samsung Catalyst, BMW i Ventures, Atomico, Playfair Capital and Wellington Partners.

Image: Alex Pettersson/Wikimedia Commons