Spanish ‘open source geospatial startup’ CartoDB has closed a $8 million Series A led by Berlin VC Earlybird. Currently based in Madrid – the company is moving its HQ to New York – CartoDB’s platform creates interactive maps featuring visualisations, recently and notably including the spread of violence in Ferguson, Missouri.
It is also used by corporations like Deloitte and Twitter, organisations such as NASA and the UN, and education institutions like Stanford, Yale and Columbia for large real time data analyses.
Existing investors Kibo Ventures and Vitamina K are also participating in the funding round, which will pay for continued growth of the company’s community as it looks to become a geospatial standard on the web.
CartoDB describes its platform – which currently boasts 50,000 users and 100,000 active map applications – as a “cloud based open-source mapping platform for everything from simple visualisations to complex but highly scalable geospatial applications and analytics.” It has a focus not on the maps themselves, but on the data and application laters on top. The platform can be accessed via a simple editor or, for more advanced functionalities, an API.
“By knowing that ‘everything happens someplace’ you can begin to imagine maps that will help people understand the world in many new and useful ways,” said Javier de la Torre, CEO and founder of CartoDB. “We want to get CartoDB into the hands of everyone who is ready to map their data, so we brought in Earlybird to gain from their expertise in building communities and technology simultaneously.”