Our roots

We needed better mapping tools to do our job, so we built them. Our first maps supported international development operations, working side-by-side with our partners at United Nations, State, World Bank, USAID, and Doctors without Borders. We were on the ground; mapping clinics in Nigeria, floods in Pakistan, deforestation in Congo, and elections in Afghanistan. Our maps were needed in some of the most demanding conditions, so we got good at building a high performance, distributed platform that performs well across the world, delivering huge amounts of data across low bandwidth networks to low-powered mobile devices.
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These organizations didn’t only need better tools to work with their data — where they were working the map was blank. They needed better data. We expanded our mission to not only make tools to work with data, but to map the world.  In 2013, we opened our mapping platform to developers and designers. Those developers now include some of the largest, most exciting brands and organizations in the world. Facebook, Tableau, Snapchat, IBM, Microsoft, Uber, AMZL -- all are using our live location platform to drive their business.
 
We've grown the business from a bootstrapped start-up in an alley garage on 14th street in Washington, DC, to a brilliant team of 500+ with offices across the world. Today, our maps are made from the live anonymous sensor data we are collecting from hundreds of millions of users. This creates a data flywheel, where our AI-powered data pipeline processes hundreds of million miles of anonymized, aggregated live road and telemetry data, every day — allowing Mapbox to continuously update the map everywhere in the world.