Offline travel app Maps.me has raised $50M (approx €41.3M) in a fresh round of funding led by Alameda Research, a Hong Kong-based investment firm and liquidity provider. Genesis Capital and CMS Holdings also participated in this round.
Use of the raised capital
Reportedly, the new funds will help the company to roll out a multi-currency wallet on Maps.me and enable a decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem on the platform. With DeFi, it looks to develop the tool into an “everyday app,” making Maps.me more mainstream.
This means that the Maps.me 2.0 version would allow users to store values and earn yields of up to 8 per cent, as well as make both domestic and international transactions. The app would also have a cashback feature on its transactions.
“By embedding and democratising access to yield-earning finance to millions of users via an everyday app, Maps.me has the potential to really propel DeFi mainstream adoption and bring a groundbreaking technology to the masses,” says, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of Alameda Research and also crypto exchange FTX.
About Maps.me
The company was founded in 2011 by Alex Zolotarev, Siarhei Rachytski, Victor Govako, and Yury Melnichek. Maps.me is a free mobile offline map for travellers which covers all countries of the world which are available for download from within the application.
Maps.me gets its map data from OpenStreetMap.org (Wikipedia of maps) – an open database of geographic information which is updated by the community of 5.7 million contributors. The application includes the map data in full details with streets, house names, tourist attractions, hiking/cycling trails, local businesses and other key information.
After the download, the maps and all the built-in features work offline and do not require an internet connection (map, search, filters, car/pedestrian/bike/transit routing and navigation with voice instructions). With the internet connection, you can also get free car traffic in 38 countries and access a public catalogue with thousands of travel guides and itineraries, created by professional companies, individual bloggers, and active travellers.
Currently, the company has over 140 million installations globally, available for iOS and Android and translated into 28 languages. According to the Coindesk report, over 58 per cent of Maps.me users come from the European continent, and more than 70 per cent are between the ages of 18 and 40.
The company is said to have been registered in Cyprus, however, as per its LinkedIn profile, Maps.me is currently headquartered in Amsterdam.
About Mail.ru
In 2014, Mail.ru Group, an Amsterdam-based Russian internet company, acquired 100 per cent stakes of Maps.me for RUB 542M (approx €6M). According to Mail.ru, in 2019, the travel app’s revenue amounted to RUB 159M (approx €1.7M) with an EBITDA loss of RUB 25M (approx €279K).
Maps.me was recently sold to Daegu Limited for about €17M.
Mail.ru Group is an internet company in the high-growth Russian-speaking Internet markets (Russia is Europe’s largest Internet market measured by the number of users, comScore). The company claims to own Russia’s leading email service and is one of Russia’s largest internet portals. It operates all three of the Russian language social networks, Vkontakte (VK), Odnoklassniki (OK) and Moi Mir (My World), and Russia’s largest online games business.
In 2013, Mail.ru Group launched its first global project My.com that provides a suite of communication and entertainment apps.
