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W. Marc Bernsau
MHT's Galen Moore: Hiring trends and opportunities
MHT's Galen Moore: New 'hyperlocal' web trend
Map of New England mapping companies
Headquarters: Cambridge
Web: www.zoomatlas.com
E-mail: msherman@zoomatlas.com
Founded: 2007
Employees: 9
The Pitch: ZoomAtlas is seeking $5 million to $7 million to buy servers, advertise and hire employees.
On a trip to Queens, New York, where he grew up a few years back, Mark Sherman wanted to leave a note on the former home of a friend he’d had trouble tracking down. The impulse wasn’t practical — until he used it as the starting point for his map-based social network, ZoomAtlas.
With ZoomAtlas, users can add notes to one big social map that, for now, covers the entire United States. Users add notes to locations where they’ve lived, worked, gone to school, etc. Sherman said people who’ve used the service recommended calling it “Placebook.”
“Obviously I would never do that from a trademark perspective,” said Sherman, 48.
Users also can edit the map to define properties and build photorealistic models of a site. Sherman said he had 12 video game artists render textured components — earth, bricks, shingles, trees, crops and other things — that can be used to build location models. Users can also write articles about a given location with the site’s wiki feature and can add metatags to a place — the number of lanes in a bowling alley, for example.
Users can create a “life path,” a timeline of all the places they’ve frequented during their lives, such as a school or playground. Almost all of the data on the site is public, but users can mark their current address and other personal information private, Sherman said. The startup bought its own maps rather than build on top of Google Maps or another API. It uses street data that is in the public domain through the U.S. Census Bureau.
ZoomAtlas launched the site using about $1.2 million raised from within and from angel investors. Sherman is looking for $5 million to $7 million in funding to buy new servers for a higher traffic load, for advertising and to add staff.
ZoomAtlas isn’t Sherman’s first startup. In 1996, he and his wife started Microsurf, a company that ran Mortgagequotes.com, a real estate information site, and later, Movequotes.com, which would tell users how much it would cost to move to a different city. Microsurf sold to TMP Worldwide for $50 million. TMP, then the name for the parent company of Monster.com, mismanaged the sites after the purchase, Sherman claims. “They destroyed it in 12 months,” he said.
The experience hasn’t soured Sherman on another potential exit from ZoomAtlas, but he said this time around, he’d want to make sure his creation was handled differently.
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