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MapD  is a privately held analytics platform that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) to query and visualize massive datsets. It is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and was founded in 2013. The company provides solutions to the government, public and private companies.

Company Overview
MapD Technologies was founded by Todd Mostak and Tom Graham in Boston in 2013.

The idea for the company came out of Mostak’s graduate work at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where Mostak studied from 2010 to 2012.

Mostak was studying the Arab Spring and in particular, the role that social media played in that movement. Unable to analyze the millions of tweets using conventional computing solutions, Mostak turned to GPUs to crunch and visualize the datasets.

While at Harvard, Mostak took classes at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratories (CSAIL) taught by renowned professors Michael Stonebraker and Sam Madden, both of whom encouraged Mostak to pursue his work with GPU databases.

In 2013, Mostak partnered with Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis to build the first instance of the company’s tweet map demonstration. Mostak then joined Harvard’s Kennedy School as a Research Fellow on Quantitative Political Science on Middle Eastern issues.

Later that year, Mostak joined CSAIL as a Research Fellow where he worked on the concept of GPU databases among other projects, officially incorporating that fall.

In January of 2014, funded by family and friends, Mostak left MIT to pursue MapD full time. Two months later, MapD won Nvidia's Early Stage Challenge, providing the company with $100,000 to pursue the idea of a GPU database and visualization layer. That fall, Mostak relocated the company from Boston to San Francisco, CA.

In the spring of 2015, the company closed a seed round that included investments from Google Ventures (now GV), Nvidia and Vanedge Capital.

On March 30th, 2016, the company announced general availability of its database and visualization products as well as the company’s Series A Round, which was $10 million led by Vanedge Capital with additional participation from Verizon Ventures and Nvidia.



Software
The company builds and sells two software products, the MapD database product and the Immerse visualization layer. The MapD database is specifically designed for GPU environments and takes advantage of both the memory bandwidth and the massive parallelism available on that hardware. By tuning the database for these hardware capabilities, MapD can execute queries at 100x the speed of traditional CPU databases.

Furthermore, by using the video rendering capabilities for which GPUs were initially designed, MapD has built a visualization layer called Immerse that is capable of rendering large datasets (billions of rows of data) with millisecond lag.

Awards and recognition

 * MapD was awarded the Nvidia Early Stage Challenge in 2014.
 * Gartner named MapD as one of its five “Cool Vendors” for database management systems for 2016.
 * The Telecom Council nominated MapD for the SPIFFY awards under the "Ground Breaker Award for Engineering Excellence" category in 2016.
 * In September of 2016 the company was awarded the prestigious Innovation by Design Award by Fast Company Magazine for its Immerse demonstation of political donations.
 * In October of 2016 the company was named Startup of the Year by the Business Intelligence Group.