Our vision at Mapbox is to power navigation for people, packages, and vehicles everywhere. Implicit within that vision is the goal of providing accurate geolocation data coverage for every household and business around the world. That’s a pretty big goal that requires working with thousands of data sources globally, adding and correcting custom data internally, and working with you, the user of apps and services we power, to improve and expand to every door.  

The latest release of address data for Mapbox Search makes significant progress against this aspirational goal by adding address coverage for 11 new countries, and improving address coverage for an additional 25 countries. This adds coverage for more than 47 million households and businesses, and our global point address coverage now exceeds 380 million households and businesses.

You may be asking, “why focus so hard on such an enormous goal?” Because accurate geolocation data is critical to nearly everything we do.  Right now, there is no single geo-location intelligence platform with global coverage to serve developers. The big players in the market are building things for themselves, like consumer mapping applications, and developers do not have the funding or capacity to create geo-location data on a global scale with the kind of quality they need.

Mapbox is entirely focused on empowering their developer community with the tools and data that they need in order to build solutions for their organization. Unlike large players, Mapbox does not need to feed its own consumer serving business that would potentially compete with our customers.

Providing the address of every household and business in the world means covering around 3 billion address points, and with our most recent coverage expansions, we are now 14% of the way there. In the last two years, Mapbox has grown its support for delivery and routing from 18 countries to 64, with 11 of those added in the last 90 days. These coverage improvements have enabled Instacart to expand their business into Australia and Canada, Toyota to deliver an excellent dealership experience across all of Europe, and Viasat to expand to Brazil.

We’re not just scratching the surface in the geographies we cover, either. Routing requires excellent data for a great user experience, and we take that to heart. In the U.S., our address coverage exceeds some of the leading location services by 10 to 30%, depending on the state. In Europe, our address coverage exceeds those location services by 5 to 30%. Both are constantly improving while we also add coverage for new countries.

Over the past 2 years, Mapbox has increased coverage by nearly 70 million records in previously supported geographies, with some countries seeing more than 50% growth in the number of addresses covered.

We are pleased to announce that we now provide address geocoding services in Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine, Belarus, Norway, and Lithuania.  

Stay tuned. We are not done yet!