Industry Maps CEO Eric Gundersen (2010–) Number of employees 180 | Website mapbox.com Founded 2010 Type of business Private | |
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Key people Eric Gundersen, Tom MacWright Headquarters Washington, D.C., San Francisco Profiles | ||
Getting to know mapbox
Mapbox is a large provider of custom online maps for websites such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Evernote, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel and Uber Technologies. 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 and OpenStreetMap. Mapbox is the creator of, or a significant contributor to some open source mapping libraries and applications, including the MBTiles specification, the TileMill cartography IDE, the Leaflet JavaScript library, and the CartoCSS map styling language and parser.
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History
The startup 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 $10M funding round by Foundry Group. In June 2015, Mapbox announced it had raised $52.55 million in a Series B round of funding.
Early work on OpenStreetMap tools, including the iD editor, was funded by a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.
On 2016-07-11, MapQuest discontinued the open tile API and users such as GNOME Maps were switched to a temporarily free tier of the Mapbox tileserver, while considering alternatives.