The Building Blocks

Our roots
Press
Fact sheet
Mission

Maps change how we build cities, deliver commerce, navigate the world, and understand our planet. Mapbox is a mapping and location cloud platform for developers — we don’t have an app, we’re the building blocks; the SDKs and APIs for developers and designers to build real time location awareness into their own apps.
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700 million monthly active users touch our maps. This creates a feedback cycle, where our AI-powered data pipeline processes +300 million miles of anonymized and aggregated live road telemetry data daily — allowing Mapbox to continuously update the map everywhere in the world. Businesses need continuously updating traffic, roads, places around the world and our platform shares this live map with developers via our scalable mapping software components (maps, navigation, search) for mobile and web applications, logistics and dispatching, and in- car automotive navigation.

Location is a core component of the apps we use every day. Whether you’re sharing with friends on Snapchat, seeing if it’s going to rain on Weather.com, using Facebook to find a restaurant, shopping on Shopify, tracking breaking news on Bloomberg, exploring a city with Lonely Planet, or checking your ETA in Lyft — location is an essential part of every one of these applications, and they’re all powered by Mapbox. We design beautiful maps and developer-friendly tools to let analytics companies understand big geo data, drone companies publish flyovers, real estate sites visualize properties, satellite companies process cloud-free imagery, and insurance companies track assets. We’re changing the way people move around cities and explore our world. Company history and details below in our fact sheet. For media inquiries, contact press@mapbox.com

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.

Fact Sheet

For media inquiries, contact press@mapbox.com
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Founded: 2013 in Washington, D.C.
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Monthly Active Users: 700 million monthly active users touch our maps every month.
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Customers:  Facebook, Strava, Porsche, The New York Times, Shopify, Snap, Uber, Lyft, Yahoo! JAPAN, Rivian, DPD, The Weather Company, Tableau, United Nations, FCC, CDC, and more.
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Team & Offices: 500+ across 5 main global hubs: Washington, DC; San Francisco, CA; Helsinki, Finland; Minsk, Belarus; Tokyo, Japan.
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Active Developers: Every month more than 175,000 developers are building with Mapbox SDKs and APIs. Over 45,000 mobile apps are powered by Mapbox SDKs.

Offices: Washington, DC; San Francisco, CA; Helsinki, Finland; Minsk, Belarus; Tokyo, Japan.
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Green: As of 2018, Mapbox is 100% carbon neutral, from our offices to our servers. Learn more.
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Investors Bootstrapped in the early years, growing to 35 people and profitable before taking any outside funding. $10 million Series A in October 2013 with Foundry Group. $52 million Series B in June 2015 led by DFJ Growth and with DBL Partners, Thrive Capital, Pritzker Group, Promus Ventures, and Jon Winkelried joining the team. $164 million Series C in October 2017 led by the SoftBank Vision Fund and with Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, DBL Partners, and Thrive Capital.

Open Source: 800+ public repositories on GitHub.

Our Mission

Data-driven decision-making requires better tools. We’re building the live location platform for a hyper-connected and automated future. Location is the coordinate system for everything, and our decentralized network of sensors transforms live data into the pulse of our planet — changing how everything moves and ultimately transforming how we live and understand our world.

Company Values

Our strategy informs what we do. Our values inform who we hire, reward, promote, and how we work as a team and with our customers.

‍Solve root problems. Understand the why. We do things because they make sense, not because “that’s how it’s done.” Success and impact depend on us solving problems at their core. Challenge conventional wisdom and rethink solutions.

‍Debate, decide, and commit. Be informed, get feedback, and challenge assumptions. Once a decision is made, commit and execute together.

‍JFDI (pronounced jedi). Commit, then act. We empower people and teams by providing context, autonomy, and responsibility. Great contributors own problems and execute. Great managers get work done by setting context, not by control.

‍Highly aligned, loosely coupled. Align teams around goals, establish accountability, and move quickly with autonomy. We scale through teams that work independently with clearly defined interfaces and trust.

‍Be scrappy and move fast. We are limited by time and money. Optimize for both. Use process to increase our speed and results — not for its own sake. Be ruthless with your and others’ time. Hire yourself out of a job.

‍Build with empathy. We do great work by understanding the success of our customers and developers, end users of their products, and each other. The most competitive products are accessible, inclusive, and avoid bias.

‍Collective IQ. We work as teams because individual perspectives are incomplete and individual input counts. A diversity of perspectives broaden the signal we can see, so listen actively to colleagues, customers, and surroundings.

‍Deliver results. We focus on outcomes, not just effort. Great things get done by bringing together creative, technically astute people in an environment for them to deliver.

‍Embrace unknowns. Be tough, because change is hard. Be courageous, because change is scary. Have vision, because change contains uncertainty.

‍Failure hurts. Grow from it. Don’t delay failure, protect others from it, or hide it. Address it by helping people respond to and reflect on failures. Understand root causes, take action, and grow.

‍Personal growth. Work so that there is no distinction between building, working, and learning. Work the hours that respect the opportunity in front of you. You get out what you put in.

‍Communicate with transparency. Share context on why decisions are made. Talk directly, honestly, and constructively. Surface problems, ask for help, and talk about what you need to be successful. Create room for honesty without retaliation.

‍Be respectful and humble. To everyone — always.