62 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2018TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBESE
ric Gundersen sipped tea and haggled for maps as he
sat in the basement of a government oce in Kabul.
A tattooed, fast-talking American with perennial
stubble, Gundersen was running an 18-person inter-
national development consulting company when he
was commissioned by the U.S. State Department to plot prob-
lem areas in the country in the atermath of Afghanistan’s 2009
presidential election, which was marked by low turnout and al-
legations of voter fraud.
Gundersen, now 38, needed to visualize data trapped in
thousands of PDFs of voter records. But in 2009, as Google
Street View cars were snapping photos of cities around the globe,
views of Kabul were still largely blank. “It’s almost like trying to
think about the world before Wikipedia,” he says. So Gunder-
sen and his team mashed up their own maps using Mapbox, a
tool they had started to build a year before.
Nine years later, more than 350 million people touch a Map-
box visualization every month, whether they realize it or not.
he company provides maps for Snapchat, the Weather Chan-
nel and the itness app Strava. It powers ETAs for grocery-de-
livery app Instacart and works with Tesla, Lyt and Uber.
Investors have put $230 million into the company, at a val-
uation of around $700 million. Mapbox is on track to gener-
ate an estimated $100 million in revenue this year but no proits.
One problem: Only 3% of Mapbox users pay for it. he compa-
ny hopes to move that a couple of percentage points and achieve
proitability by building out mapping services for self-driv-
ing cars and augmented reality. But that means competing with
Google. Mapbox is more customizable than Google Maps, but
it’s an open question whether such advantages will be enough to
overcome the search giant’s deep pool of engineering talent and
even deeper pockets.
Mapbox has gotten this far by focusing strictly on the de-
velopers, creating a basic building block, à la Stripe or Amazon
Web Services, that a wide variety of businesses can use. While
many mapping companies give users a inished map, Map-
box is akin to a box of Legos that engineers can customize. It’s
easy to change the fonts and the color scheme and add featureslike turn-by-turn directions and terrain information. Four-
square became Mapbox’s irst major customer in 2012, ditching
Google Maps for the less expensive, more lexible alternative.
he service is free to start but still not cheap to scale. For
extensive enterprise use, the average annual contract starts at
around $40,000 and can reach into the millions, like its $5 mil-
lion contract with Tesla. he “freemium” model has some hid-
den advantages. Developers have usually been playing with
Mapbox for months before Gun der sen ever walks into a meet-
ing to close a sale.
Widespread adoption has other beneits. Mapbox doesn’t
need to send out pricey cars or satellites in space to map the
world. “Map data is not like food, air, water that’s just around. It
takes active work to make it,” says Young Hahn, Mapbox’s CTO.
Whenever someone opens a Mapbox map, that person’s phone
or computer sends three pieces of anonymous data back to the
company: longitude, latitude and a time stamp. hese billions
of data points constantly improve Mapbox’s real-time plug-and-
play map of the world. “Every time you touch the map, the map
is learning,” Gundersen says. “It’s that lywheel.”
It took nearly a decade to build that virtuous cycle. When
Gundersen let Afghanistan in 2009, he ran Mapbox as a small
project within his consulting company for several years. he
consulting business subsidized Mapbox for a while, but ater al-
most missing payroll in 2010 and racking up nearly $250,000
in personal debt, Gundersen started looking for backers. He i-
nally secured a $10 million funding round in October 2013.
Today more than 1.1 million engineers have registered to
use Mapbox’s sotware, and the service has buy-in from devel-
opers like Jody Kelman, a self-driving-car product manager for
Lyt, which uses Mapbox’s maps to show passengers in its au-
tonomous cars what the vehicle is seeing on the road. “Making
tools that engineers like to use is a really impressive feat,” she
says. “Engineers are really hard to please.”
Gundersen’s next challenge is to turn that technical praise
into more paying customers. hat won’t be easy, but the poten-
tial payout is enormous. “If we get this right,” he says, “we’ll be
inside everything.”Technology
The Right Direction
BY BIZ CARSONDevelopers love Mapbox’s customizable, plug-and-play maps, which power
apps like Snapchat and the Weather Channel. Now the startup needs to
figure out how to compete with Google in the race to steer self-driving cars.DISRUPTORSF