INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
If you are a developer and you want to use the Google Maps Platform to power direction or other location-basedfeatures in your applications,
things can quickly get expensive
Mapfit, which today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million funding round, promises to challenge Google on price while offering
geocoding services and vector-based maps that are just as accurate as Google (and sometimes even better).
Among other things, Mapfitpromises
that it can figure out the correct entrances of buildings for 95 percent of addresses, making door-to-door navigation easier, for example
Mapfit also argues that its new vector-based maps are 95 percent smaller than the map tiles that other services often use
The service does offer those traditional tiles, too, though, and they include support for 3D buildings and public transit info.
The company
was founded in 2015 and gets its data from a variety of sources, including both commercial and open data sets
It then takes this data and runs it through a number of steps to validate it and enhance it with its own algorithms for aligning addresses
with pedestrian and vehicle entrances, for example.
Mapfit offers a free plan for non-commercialprojects and developers who simply want to
kick the service tires, as well as a $49/month &growth& plan for startups that comes with 250,000 map views, 150,000 geocode requests and
150,000 directions requests
There is no limit to the number of mobile SDK and web users under thisplan
For users who need more API requests, Mapfitcharges $0.50 per 1,000 additional requests or users can opt for the $1,499/month enterprise
plan, which includes 5 million map views.
The company funding comes from a group of entrepreneurs and investors that include Cavalry
Ventures,Weihua Yan (Diapers.com, Quidsi), Roderick Thompson (ePlanet Capital, Baidu, Skype), Auren Hoffman (SafeGraph, LiveRamp), Daniel
Waterhouse (Balderton), Jeroen Seghers (Sourcepoint), Matias de Tezanos (Hoteles.com, PeopleFund) and Joost de Valk (Yoast).
