Mapbox


Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, Facebook, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel and Snapchat. 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.
Mapbox is the creator of, or a significant contributor to, some open source mapping libraries and applications, including the Mapbox GL-JS JavaScript library, the MBTiles specification, the TileMill cartography IDE, the Leaflet JavaScript library, and the CartoCSS map styling language and parser.

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 Series A funding round by Foundry Group. In June 2015, Mapbox announced it had raised $52.55 million in a Series B round of funding led by DFJ Growth.
Early work on OpenStreetMap tools, including the iD editor, was funded by a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.
On July 11, 2016, 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.
In October 2017, SoftBank led a $164 million investment in Mapbox Inc., with other existing investors including venture-capital firms Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, DBL Partners and Thrive Capital. In November 2017, Mapbox acquired the Belarus-based neural network startup Mapdata.
In January 2018, Mapbox acquired the team behind the open-source routing engine .

Data sources and technology

The data are taken from open data sources, such as OpenStreetMap and NASA, and from purchased proprietary data sources, such as DigitalGlobe. The technology is based on Node.js, Mapnik, GDAL, and Leaflet.
Mapbox uses anonymised data from telemetry pings, such as Strava and RunKeeper, to identify likely missing data in OpenStreetMap with automatic methods, then manually applies the fixes or reports the issue to OSM contributors.