Mapbox Raises $52.6M Led By DFJ To Be The “Map Layer” For All Apps

With questions swirling over who may end up buying Nokia’s mapping division Here, a startup trying to disrupt it and other big boys like Google has raised some major funding. With an office in San Francisco, it’s been quietly growing, adding thousands of developers, including several high profile names like Foursquare and Pinterest, to its list of users and also making some key hires from the mapping departments of its much larger competitors. “We are making the building blocks for a platform for developers to put location and maps into their own applications.” Randy Glein, a partner at DFJ Growth who is joining the board, agrees. The boom in smartphones and other connected, unanchored devices like watches and cars has created market and consumer demand for location-based services to run on this hardware. Maps essentially underpin how a huge number of apps work — whether it is navigating yourself from point A to B, or social networking and photo sharing, or finding a shop near you, or checking out the weather, or getting something delivered — and so demand for accurate and customizable data is only growing.