Maps help people see space and express their impact, from vaccine distribution plans to fire trackers to bar crawls to celebrate a best friend's birthday. Felt is a startup based in Oakland that Sam Hashemi, Can Duruk and others founded. They are on a mission make maps more popular.Felt is a collaboration software company that aims to make it easier to create maps online. Today, it announced that it raised $4.5 Million from Bain Capital Ventures. Participants included Allison Pickens (COO of Notion), Akshay Kothari, Dylan Field (CEOof Figma), John Lily (former CEO at Firefox), Julia Hartz and Keval Desai.The millions will be used by Felt to expand its six-person distributed team, to hire more product, brand, and back-end engineers as well as product designers and product developers. The company also announced that it will launch a private beta in order to learn more about the early adopters and how they interact with the platform.Felt lets users create maps with data sets. Open a map of California and use Felts data library for information on smoke patterns and wildfires. As more integrations are made, the maps power increases. For example, a wildfire map could be integrated with census data to allow decision makers to determine how many businesses might be affected by the incoming smoke.Over time, Felt users can see other user-generated maps or team projects on the interface. They can copy these to add their own flair to the interface, and leave comments to help the community.Consumers will eventually have access to a free tier. However, the real test for Felt will be if it can attract a customer base willing to pay and use mapping software consistently in meaningful ways. This company is unique. It is not a GPS service so it will not serve those who rely on maps to find directions. Its build-a-map feature is more suitable for companies who already use it in their daily lives.Felt is intended to continue the collaborative software movement that has been highlighted by top companies such as Notion and Figma as well as a sequel of Hashemis' previous company, Remix. Remix, a startup that specializes in city transportation planning, was recently acquired by Via for $100 millions. Remix was built by Hashemi over seven years. He learned about the inadequacies and limitations of map-making. There are many uses for maps, but few people have the skills to create professional products. He hopes Felt can take mapping beyond the realm of city planning to other industries, such as science and media.Hashemi stated that we want to be more ambitious in what we are trying to achieve and to go a lot further [so] it results in a completely different type of company. ESRIs GPS, a mapping tool that was created in 1969 and is still used by thousands of companies every day, may be its most formidable competitor.Climate change could prove to be a catalyst for more customers entering the collaborative mapping market. Duruk, who worked on products for Uber and VGS, talked about the importance and response to the last year's wildfires, and the resulting orange sky in the Bay Area.Duruk stated that everyone in the Bay Area would get up and go to the weather, air quality, and fire maps. Everybody was trying to do something about maps, but only a few businesses in the world have the resources. Duruk said that everyone in the Bay Area would wake up and go to the fire map, weather map, and air quality map.Duruk stated that the challenge in creating a powerful and creative tool is that people could misuse maps to target or abuse them. Felt is currently thinking of ways to ensure that bad actors don't misuse mapping information.The startup, which is still in its early stages, is focusing on expression to help it understand its products boundaries. Felt has millions more to help people increase their ability by increasing the map-ability of the globe.
