Interview with the CEO of the startup Mapillary after the investment
The American venture capital firm Sequoia invest $1,500,000 in Mapillary; together with other great CVs. Mapillary is a Swedish street view startup that challenges Google Street View with the goal of mapping the whole world through crowdsourcing. The app makes it possible to share your favorite places with the rest of the world. To date the startup has close to 7 million photos uploaded and covers more than 200,000 square kilometres of the world.
“The investment makes us able to grow the team a bit, to focus on scaling and completing our offerings and toolsets. We have big plans and this investment gives us some time to focus on that”. – Jan Erik Solem, CEO of Mapillary
Mapillary is an easy to use app that makes everyone able to map their part of the world through smartphones and other devices like GoPro cameras. People’s pictures are converted into a street level view of the world and used to improve online maps such as OpenStreetMap. Mapillary forms the basis for a richer view of the world, and make it possible to map places that beforehand were unreachable with conventional mapping solution such as bike lanes, pedestrian zone and parks.
“We crowdsource photos, connect and combine them across users and across time. We kept the collection process as simple as possible, making anybody with a smartphone or action camera able to easily help map the world. With Mapillary it is possible to get fresher photos with better reach than what car-based solutions can offer.”- Jan Erik Solem, CEO of Mapillary
Jan Erik Solem’s, CEO of Mapillary, goal for Mapillary in 2015 is to map 1 million kilometre, 5 times the number they have today.
“If we make it, then we will have proven that our model works.”
The Mapillary app is available for download on iOS, Android and Windows phone, together with tools for using action cameras.
You can read more about Mapillary here: https://www.mapillary.com/map.
