Philly mapmaker used by national policymakers and nonprofits raises $3M to expand product and staff

A Philly mapping software company has plans to grow its team and share data in 2024, spurred along by new funding from local investors.

PolicyMap closed a $3 million Series A round in December led by local financier and policy research firm Reinvestment Fund, its former parent company. Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Spring Point Partners, PolicyMap board members, friends and family also contributed to the 13-month-long round.

“This is the first time we’ve had investors outside of Reinvestment Fund — investors with capital who want to help us grow, which is really exciting,” Maggie McCullough, CEO of PolicyMap, told Technical.ly.

The Center City-based company’s software that allows users to create maps, gather data and analyze it through a mapping application, an analytics platform and data licensing services. Clients include academic institutions, government agencies and nonprofits such as Jefferson College of Nursing, and City of Philadelphia CultureBlocks.

PolicyMap was founded as a division of Reinvestment Fund in 2007. It spun out from Reinvestment Fund in 2017 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization. The company also left a nonprofit model and became a benefit corporation. But the company had trouble raising capital after that because there were no shares for investors, McCullough said.

In 2019, the company adjusted again, going from PolicyMap LLC to PolicyMap Inc and making Reinvestment Fund a majority shareholder rather than a parent company. Having shares to offer made it easier to raise funds, she said.

The last few years, PolicyMap was consistently growing enough that it could invest its own profits back into the business, McCullough said. However, the company has bigger plans that require a bigger infusion of cash, so it felt like the right time to fundraise.

The new $3 million will go toward supporting sales and marketing, improving PolicyMap’s SaaS data and mapping application, launching new products, and hiring more staff. The team currently has 25 people but McCullough hopes to hire seven more this year.

“Our excitement about PolicyMap is driven by its exceptional ability to democratize complex geographic data while making it accessible and actionable for a diverse range of industries,”  Jon Beschen, investment director with Ben Franklin Technology Partners, told Technical.ly via email. “The impressive growth, robust customer base, and a visionary management team made investing in this Philly-based company a no-brainer.”

The company’s technology has evolved over the years, with a new version of PolicyMap’s mapping application launching about four years ago.

“It was an improved UI. It’s all in AWS. It’s a Mapbox and a suite of tools that work with Mapbox. It makes it easier. It’s a more contemporary mapping application,” McCullough said. “In [the] AWS normalized database it renders the maps very quickly. So that was our huge milestone that we released [around 2020].”

Going forward, the company is thinking about how to make it easy to access existing data in AWS. In addition to selling its SaaS subscription, McCullough said the company also wants to license its existing data.

“It’s the distribution of the data,” she said. “It’s getting the application at a more enterprise level into organizations, not just three people within an entity using PolicyMap for a particular job and then being done, but rather getting it embedded into an entity and then finding more opportunities for partnerships.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.