Financing

MetaCarta was founded in 1999 by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[25][1] By early 2001, John and Erik Rauch had developed a prototype of the Geographic Text Search product and incorporated the company together with Doug Brenhouse.^[26][27] In July 2001, they received $500,000 from DARPA’s Next Generation Internet Program.^[28][29][30] In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, including Esther Dyson, Bob Frankston, David P. Reed and Pattie Maes invested.^{[27][31][32][33][34]}

In October 2002, CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel invested and Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, said "there is tremendous interest and value in this type of geospatial information service and MetaCarta is the first company in this space in which we have invested."^[8][35] In-Q-Tel invested a second time in 2004.^[36]

In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from a syndicate led by Sevin Rosen.^[37] Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest,^[38] and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study.^[27] Sevin Rosen’s cofounder Ben Rosen has historical ties to Esther Dyson,^[39] and had invested in Bob Frankston’s company VisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm of Chevron Texaco.^[37][40] In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech.^[41][42][43] Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series B syndicate went into receivership^[44] and the syndicate’s lead investor Sevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up.^[45] This forced the Sevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart.^[46][47]

Oil & Gas

In 2007, the company launched a product for the energy sector in partnership with IHS,^[48][49] and Schlumberger acquired exclusive distribution rights in the petroleum industry.^[13][50][15] The company partnered with content providers like the Society of Petroleum Engineers to support upstream exploration use cases.^[51][52]

Acquisition

Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010,^[53] a few months after the company reported record revenue growth.^[54] Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind its HERE.com location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July, 2010.^[55] In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to found Diffeo.^[56] Don Zereski, the CEO of MetaCarta at the time of its acquisition by Nokia became VP of Search and Discovery at HERE and led acquisitions of other startups.^{[57][58][59][60]} Qbase re-launched MetaCarta as part of Synthos Technologies, now Finch, naming Erin-Michael Gill, CEO in September 2014.^[61]

MetaCarta Labs

In addition to its commercial products, its lab website labs.metacarta.com launched a number of geoweb, neogeography, and open source software projects that gained notoriety through O'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences,^{[77][78][79][80]} including Gutenkarte.org,^[81] TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now a project in Open Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations^[82] with Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, Firefox, and a map rectifier.^{[83][84][85][86]} Shortly before being acquired, MetaCarta granted the source code for its enterprise content crawler to the Apache Foundation to create the Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF)^[87]