For the last three years MapBox has bootstrapped all of their funding, but today they can breathe easy after closing a Series A funding round and receiving $10 million from Foundry Group. The funds will go towards expanding their Washington DC and San Francisco office staff and setting concrete plans for future growth.
MapBox CEO Eric Gundersen has made it his mission to be one of the biggest competitors to Google Maps, Nokia’s HERE, and ESRI. And his strategy to distinguish the platform has been to develop and build for mobile above all else, giving him a perceived advantage.
That mentality has appealed to an impressive list of paying customers including NPR, Uber, Evernote, GitHub, Hipmunk, and Foursquare who all use MapBox. The benefit for them is that they can use the cloud based mapping platform to personalize the look and feel of their web and mobile services.
“We are big fans of API-driven products consumed by developers that provide fundamental ‘every app needs this’ functionality,” reads Foundry Group’s blog post. “MapBox fits very much into this worldview.”
And MapBox sees Foundry Group as the perfect partner who understands big data, their platform play, and how open source and open data are a comparative advantage. The most important piece of information though, according to Gundersen, is that Foundry Group believes in the long term business plans to break open the space and stay independent.
“To our early adopters, strategic partners, open source contributors, and those who have taken MapBox to places we never expected, get ready for an awesome ride,” says Gundersen.
