Mapsense, the world's most powerful platform for understanding large location datasets, has launched a suite of free open-source developer tools and is accepting new customers after nearly two years of development and private work with select enterprises in the Fortune 500, government, financial sector, and advertising industry. The company has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by prominent Silicon Valley investor General Catalyst, with participation from Formation8, Redpoint Ventures, TenOneTen Partner Gil Elbaz and Amplify.LA.

There are nearly 16 billion devices worldwide creating an almost constant stream of new data. 90% of this data was created in the past two years, and more than 70% of it is associated with location. Traditional GIS tools, revolutionary when they were introduced in the 1970s, are now ill equipped to translate these streams of location data into insight and require special training, costly hardware, and bespoke server setups.

In response, Mapsense has created a sophisticated cloud-based platform that can ingest billions of rows of data in real-time while delivering an incredibly responsive and intuitive user experience. In order to generate map data analysis and visualizations that can be used, modified and manipulated in real-time, Mapsense combines a custom spatial datastore with dynamic vector map tiles, which instruct the browser on rendering raw map data, instead of relying on static images.

This approach allow users to leverage the power of modern browsers to access underlying meta-information in the map, such as building elevations or demographic profiles, for use in apps and visualizations.

Currently, Mapsense is in use at numerous data-driven organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, major banking institutions, government bodies and advertising agencies, who use the platform to glean insights from their data that weren't possible with other tools. Mapsense helps its customers:

Analyze large databases of credit card transactions for behavioral analysis and fraud detection
Empower advertisers with real-time insight on user activity to deliver more effective ads in the right time and place
Help mobile app developers build more responsive location-based apps that can react quickly to user load, like high-traffic areas
Support wildlife researchers in understanding animal migration behavior
Work with police and city planners in identifying hotbeds of activity and infraction patterns to help reduce crime

'We work with Fortune 500 brands who are focused on gaining actionable insights from their campaigns. Mapsense helps Thinknear create analytic tools that are very valuable to our clients,' said Lucas Dickey, VP of Product at Thinknear. 'The advertising industry has moved toward data driven analysis to deliver value and demonstrate concrete results in advertising campaigns. Mapsense has provided a tool to make campaigns more efficient while supporting our proof of ROI.'

'At Curbside, location is critical to our business, as we need to be able to show users great merchants wherever they are shopping with our mobile app,' said Jaron Waldman, founder and CEO of popular local shopping app Curbside. 'Mapsense has made it easy to draw insight from the gigabytes of location data we generate in a secure, anonymized and simple way so we can make sure we plan ahead and establish the right level of service for our customers as we expand to new markets.'

'When I was at Palantir, I witnessed firsthand the incredible explosion of location data and how difficult it was to unlock value from that data to make effective business decisions,' said Erez Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Mapsense. 'We created Mapsense because we realized there is a huge demand for tools specifically for location data, and that we could deliver in that sweet spot by creating a modern, simple-to-use platform for developers and enterprises.'

'Location based analytics is increasingly becoming core for marketing and operational decisions,' said Hemant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst. 'Mapsense has built a terrific cloud based geospatial analytics service that can be accessed with a simple API.'

Starting today, Mapsense will offer two products to anyone interested in using the platform:

Mapsense Enterprise
Data visualization, analysis, & segmentation tools for terabytes of data
Integrates directly into customer-facing products
Available as on-premise or hosted deployments
Pricing: Available on request

Mapsense Developer
Mapping library that merges D3.js with vector tiles in order to offer incredibly flexible, easy-to manipulate maps
Suite of rich public datasets that can be used on their own (or together with custom datasets)
Initial offerings include data sets from Open Street Maps, Twitter, the US Census, global earthquake data, world airports, urban crime data, Mapsense's own curated world and demographics maps, and a number of others
Pricing: Free for up to one million map queries per month

About Mapsense
Mapsense is building the world's most powerful and user-friendly platform for understanding big location datasets, offering sophisticated yet accessible map analytics tools for developers and enterprises. 70% of the world's data is associated with location, and businesses of all sizes need to leverage that data to make smart business decisions quickly and accurately. With an infrastructure capable of streaming billions of rows of location data, Mapsense helps its customers build map analytic tools for reporting, monitoring, geographic segmentation, and forecasting.

Mapsense works with Fortune 500 companies, governments, the financial sector, and the advertising industry, with broad applications for healthcare, location-aware apps, real estate, and more. Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, California, the team consists of engineers and product managers with backgrounds at Palantir, Berkeley, Stanford, Google, and Apple. Its investors include General Catalyst, Formation8, Redpoint Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures and Amplify.LA. Visit mapsense.co to learn more.