Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Maps |
Founded | 2010 |
Founder | Bonnie Bogle Eric Gundersen |
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Key people |
|
Revenue | $100 million (2019) [1] |
Number of employees | 650+ [2] |
Website | mapbox |
Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, the Financial Times , The Weather Channel, Instacart, and Strava. [3] Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps. [3]
By 2020, Mapbox switched to a proprietary software license for most of the software it previously maintained as open source. [4] As of October 2020, Mapbox had a valuation of $1 billion. [5]
The startup [3] was created as a part of Development Seed in order to offer map customization for non-profit customers, in 2010. It was bootstrapped until a 2013 $10 million Series A funding round by Foundry Group. [6] In June 2015, Mapbox announced it had raised $52.55 million in a Series B round of funding led by DFJ Growth. [7]
Early work on OpenStreetMap tools, including the iD editor, was funded by a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. [8]
On July 11, 2016, MapQuest discontinued the open tile API [9] and users such as GNOME Maps were switched to a temporarily free tier of the Mapbox tileserver, [10] while considering alternatives. [11]
In October 2017, SoftBank led a $164 million investment in Mapbox Inc., with other existing investors including venture-capital firms Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, DBL Partners and Thrive Capital. [12] In November 2017, Mapbox acquired the Belarus-based neural network startup Mapdata. [13]
In January 2018, Mapbox acquired the team behind the open-source routing engine Valhalla. [14]
In December 2020, Mapbox released the second version of their JavaScript library for online display of maps, Mapbox GL JS. Previously open source code under a BSD license, the new version switched to proprietary licensing. [15] [4] This resulted in a fork of the open source code, MapLibre GL, and initiation of the MapLibre project.
In March 2021, the company appointed a new chief executive officer, Peter Sirota, formerly of AWS. [16] Sirota replaced Eric Gundersen, who became "chief strategy officer" and chairman of the board. [17]
In June 2021, workers at Mapbox announced that a majority of US-based employees had signed and submitted union authorization cards to the National Labor Relations Board in order to be represented by the Communication Workers of America, through CODE-CWA. [18] [19] Mapbox declined to voluntarily recognize the union, requesting an election be held in addition to the card check. [20] The election, conducted the following August, resulted in 123 votes versus 81 in favor of forming a union. [21]
On June 14, 2022, the NLRB issued a complaint against Mapbox, citing coercive actions, like threats and surveillance, and the firing of union organizers. [22] [23] Shortly after, an article was published describing the union busting tactics used at Mapbox. [24] A court date was set for October 3, 2022, however a settlement agreement was ultimately reached. [25]
The data is taken from open data sources, such as OpenStreetMap and NASA, and from purchased proprietary data sources, such as DigitalGlobe. [26] [27] The technology is based on Node.js, [28] Mapnik, GDAL, and Leaflet.
Mapbox uses anonymized data from telemetry pings, such as Strava and RunKeeper, to identify likely missing data in OpenStreetMap with automatic methods, then manually applies the fixes or reports the issue to OSM contributors. [29] [30]
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Bailey, Randy Glein, and Barry Schuler.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden.
Stephen T. Jurvetson is an American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is currently a board member of SpaceX among others. He later co-founded the firm Future Ventures with Maryanna Saenko, who worked with him at DFJ.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.
OpenStreetMap is a website that uses an open geographic database which is updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial photo imagery or satellite imagery, and also import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and as a result commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own topology to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine and editor.
Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a partly proprietary, mostly free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform code. The server-side MongoDB program is the only proprietary component of Meteor and is part of the Meteor download bundle. It is possible to use Meteor without using the server-side MongoDB. It uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish–subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor can be used with any popular front-end JS framework, Vue, React, Svelte, Angular, or Bazel.
Leaflet is a JavaScript library used to build web mapping applications. It allows developers without a GIS background to display tiled web maps hosted on a public server, with optional tiled overlays. It can load feature data from GeoJSON files, style it and create interactive layers, such as markers with popups when clicked.
CARTO is a software as a service (SaaS) spatial analysis platform that provides GIS, web mapping, data visualization, spatial analytics, and spatial data science features. The company is positioned as a Location Intelligence platform due to its tools for geospatial data analysis and visualization that do not require advanced GIS or development experience. As a cloud-native platform, CARTO runs natively on cloud data warehouse platforms overcoming any previous limits on data scale for spatial workloads.
PlayCanvas is an open-source 3D game engine/interactive 3D application engine alongside a proprietary cloud-hosted creation platform that allows for simultaneous editing from multiple computers via a browser-based interface. It runs in modern browsers that support WebGL, including Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The engine is capable of rigid-body physics simulation, handling three-dimensional audio and 3D animations.
Mapillary is a service for sharing crowdsourced geotagged photos, developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden. Mapillary was launched in 2013 and acquired by Meta Platforms, Inc. in 2020. It offers street level imagery similar to Google Street View.
Vector tiles, tiled vectors or vectiles are packets of geographic data, packaged into pre-defined roughly-square shaped "tiles" for transfer over the web. This is an emerging method for delivering styled web maps, combining certain benefits of pre-rendered raster map tiles with vector map data. As with the widely used raster tiled web maps, map data is requested by a client as a set of "tiles" corresponding to square areas of land of a pre-defined size and location. Unlike raster tiled web maps, however, the server returns vector map data, which has been clipped to the boundaries of each tile, instead of a pre-rendered map image.
Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.
CrateDB is a distributed SQL database management system that integrates a fully searchable document-oriented data store. It is open-source, written in Java, based on a shared-nothing architecture, and designed for high scalability. CrateDB includes components from Trino, Lucene, Elasticsearch and Netty.
Josh Stein is an American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a managing partner at Threshold Ventures and was featured in the Forbes Midas List in 2013, 2014 and 2015 in recognition of his accomplishments as an investor. He was also the recipient of the 2015 Deloitte Fast 500 Venture Capitalist of the Year award. Stein holds board responsibilities at Box (company), Chartbeat, LaunchDarkley, LendKey, Lumity, and Talkdesk—and led Box’s first round of institutional investment. He is also an investor in AngelList, Doximity, Front, Loftium, Periscope Data acquired by Sisense, and Rippling.
Yury Melnichek is a tech-entrepreneur, venture investor and software engineer. He was born in Minsk (Belarus), lived in Switzerland for more than 16 years and now lives in Cyprus. He was the founder of the free cartographic service MapsWithMe, AIMATTER company and Vochi. In December 2021, together with Anna Melnichek, founded the investment company Melnichek Investments to invest in promising machine learning and biotech startups. Apart from investment activities, Yury provides consulting services in venture investment, mobile applications marketing, and also provides consultancy services for IT-companies and startups working with machine learning, computer vision and data science.
Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.
The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and employed at least two full time staff, including GWU co-founder Emma Kinema and veteran SEIU organizer Wes McEnany. In 2022, Jessica Gonzalez joined, a former Activision Blizzard QA tester.
Thrive Capital Management, LLC, commonly Thrive Capital, is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. It focuses on software and internet investments. The firm was founded by Joshua Kushner who is also co-founder of Oscar Health and minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies.