Mapbox builds a real-time, AI-enabled mapping platform that powers navigation and location services for automakers, logistics providers, and mobile apps. Its maps are used by customers including Toyota, General Motors, BMW, The Weather Company and Instacart. The company’s map enables vehicles and devices to share 28 billion global daily map detections and supports richer 3D map content for developers. Mapbox plans to bring AI into the car with new ADAS features for automated driving and safety and to move embedded AI processing closer to vehicle cameras and LiDAR sensors. The platform will also help automakers comply with safety standards such as Europe’s GSR and NCAP and integrate with in-vehicle battery systems to monitor energy, forecast range, suggest charging stations, and support secure payments. Mapbox provides an open-source-based mapping and location platform used by companies such as Airbnb, Instacart, Snap, and MasterCard. The company positions itself as an alternative to proprietary map providers like Google, Here, and TomTom and powers services used by roughly 300 million people. Its product set has expanded beyond smartphone maps to SDKs for automotive (Mapbox Drive) and for gaming/mixed reality via Unity. Mapbox plans to tailor its location technology for in-car navigation and autonomous driving systems, integrate with computer vision, and grow work in VR and AR. The company also intends to expand its presence in Asia, with a focus on China and Southeast Asia, leveraging SoftBank's reach. Financially, Mapbox has raised a $164M Series C and has about $228M in total funding to date. Mapbox provides customizable map layers, developer SDKs and location infrastructure that third-party apps embed rather than offering consumer-facing map products. The company says it serves high-profile customers such as Foursquare and Pinterest and over 16,000 other developers. It launched an SDK to make embeddable, customizable maps for iOS and positions itself as a platform that avoids competing with its developer customers, charging based on usage. Founded in Washington, D.C. in 2010 and with an office in San Francisco, Mapbox grew largely bootstrapped before raising institutional capital. The company is focused on expanding its technology and global teams and on acquiring strategic data assets—more accurate geocoding and new satellite imagery—to enhance its mapping database. Its business model centers on selling map and location services to developers rather than end consumers. MapBox is a cloud-based map platform that gives developers tools to add interactive, mobile-first, customizable maps to web and mobile apps. It uses OpenStreetMap as its main source of mapping data and counts 2,500+ paying subscribers including Foursquare, Uber, GitHub, Evernote, and the Financial Times. MapBox competes with Google Maps, Nokia's HERE, and ESRI but positions itself as mobile-first to deliver more responsive and interactive map experiences. The company plans to ramp up its engineering team to build low-level tech for richer map interactivity and to accelerate product development, including a premium content store. MapBox is pursuing partnerships and rev-share agreements with data providers to incorporate weather, traffic, real-time satellite and drone imagery and other content overlays. Financially, the company had been bootstrapped prior to this round and earlier received a $575,000 Knight Foundation grant to improve OpenStreetMap infrastructure. The company has offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. MapBox is a mapping company that contributes to the open-source OpenStreetMap project. It announced a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to improve OpenStreetMap's core infrastructure. MapBox said it will use the funds to make it easier to add data to OpenStreetMap, make OpenStreetMap.org more social to support the community's growth, and make it easier for people to get data out to build their own maps. The company will keep its tools open source and store data on platforms like GitHub. MapBox has been working with the Knight Foundation for several months based on a shared commitment to open data. Its work supports OpenStreetMap users including Apple iPhoto, Foursquare, NPR and Wikipedia.

Total raised

$507M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Sep 2023