Open-source mapping leader MapBox closes $10 million in funding from Foundry Group

October 16, 2013 By Editor

MapBox this morning announced it closed a $10 million Series A round from Foundry Group.

MapBox makes it easy and affordable for anyone to create highly customized, interactive maps for websites and apps using open-source tools and data. MapBox powers maps for services from foursquare and Uber to Evernote and Hipmunk (See full list here: https://www.mapbox.com/showcase/). The funding will be used by MapBox to double its 35-member team in San Francisco and Washington DC.

As Foundry Group notes in its blog post this morning: While the digital mapping and satellite imagery industry has long been dominated by large companies, governments, and a proprietary data mindset, the open-source and open-data movements have made inroads into the mapping world.”

Leading the open-source movement is OpenStreetMap, where over one million people are adding data to project every day. MapBox uses OpenStreetMap to power its maps and, thanks to a $575,000 grant as a winner of the 2012 Knight News Challenge Data, MapBox developed the mapping editor for OpenStreetMap, which launched in May 2013

This from the Foundry Group…

We are pleased to announce that we’ve led the $10m Series A funding of MapBox. Based in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA, MapBox provides a highly customizable mapping platform based on open data sources for web and mobile application developers. We became aware of MapBox this past summer via two vectors: Zack Rosen, CEO of our portfolio company Pantheon, introduced us to Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, and our portfolio company Gnip worked with MapBox and data artist Eric Fischer (now part of the MapBox team!) to do some amazing visualizations using geotagged tweets. When a company and entrepreneur is recommended to us via multiple trusted sources, we pay attention. While the digital mapping and satellite imagery industry has long been dominated by large companies, governments, and a proprietary data mindset, the open-source and open-data movements have made inroads into the mapping world. Most notable is the OpenStreetMap project, started in 2004, which now has over one million contributors worldwide building an ever-growing and extremely rich dataset. MapBox embraces open-data and open-source and provides a rich set of tools that enable publishers and web and mobile developers to quickly and easily add fast, beautiful, and highly customizable maps to their sites and apps.

Read more HERE

See also MapBox’s blog post

About Editor

Glenn is a geographer and a GIS professional with over 20 years experience in the industry. He's the co-founder of GISuser and several other technology web publications.