ServiceNow, Salesforce contribute to MapAnything's $33m funding round
MapAnything has raised $33.1 million in a Series B round led by Columbus Nova.
ServiceNow Ventures contributed to the round, as did existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Greycroft Partners, and Harbert Partners.
Individual investors Michael Lazerow, who sold his social marketing software company Buddy Media to Salesforce for $689 million, and former NBA commissioner David Stern also participated in MapAnything's Series B round.
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The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company, which began its life as a consulting firm, builds map-based applications on top of Salesforce. It essentially delivers to businesses -- specifically those that use Salesforce -- the kind of visual mapping interfaces that consumers are accustomed to when using apps such as Google Maps. This means businesses get an interactive visual representation of Salesforce data.
MapAnything claims that its solutions eliminate the need for sales representatives to manually plan their trips to meet prospects, while enabling service employees to take advantage of location-based insights.
"In your personal life, you use Google Maps, Waze, Yelp and a host of other tools to make your life more productive and efficient. We are doing the same thing, using the same location-centric approach, for your business life," said John Stewart, CEO of MapAnything.
The Series B funding, which brings the total amount raised by the company to $40.4 million, will be used for investment in the development of additional location-based apps as well as the continued development of the company's Internet of Things (IoT) platform MapAnything Live, which enables real-time tracking of IoT-enabled assets, telematics, and mobile devices.
MapAnything Live will allow Salesforce users to view the devices on an interactive map and trigger workflow automation based on the device location or events.
While the company has focused on integrating with Salesforce to date, it is looking to enable data integrations with new partners such as ServiceNow, which, from an architectural perspective, offers a similar platform to Salesforce. However, the two companies are approaching enterprise service management from different directions, ServiceNow's CEO Frank Slootman has insisted in the past.
Moving forward, ServiceNow will be bringing mapping integrations to its platform. The IT management services firm, which specialises in automating workflows, explained that many of its customers manage assets, devices, and the deployment of field agents on the ServiceNow platform, and that mapping will improve optimisation.
MapAnything is ServiceNow's fourth investment, having also invested in open source integration vendor MuleSoft, connected device management vendor Nuvolo, and telephony-related expense management vendor MobiChord.
In January, ServiceNow announced its acquisition of machine learning startup DxContinuum as it works to expand its portfolio of enterprise automation services.
The company claims to have generated annual sales of more than $1 billion in 2016. For 2017, ServiceNow has projected revenue between $1.82 billion and $1.85 billion.