MetaCarta

MetaCarta
Company type	Private
Industry	Software, Geographic information systems
Founded	1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Founder	John R. Frank, Doug Brenhouse, Erik Rauch
Fate	Acquired by Nokia in 2010; enterprise product line and brand divested to Qbase (Finch)
Successor	Qbase (Finch)
Headquarters	Cambridge, United States
Area served	Defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement, oil and gas, publishing
Key people	John R. Frank (CEO & CTO), Doug Brenhouse (COO & CFO), Erik Rauch (Co-founder), Don Zereski (CEO at acquisition)
Products	Geographic Text Search (GTS), Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP), CartaTrees, geOdrive
Website	www.metacarta.com

MetaCarta is a software company established in 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It pioneered an innovative search engine that utilized maps to pinpoint unstructured documents. The company's technology leverages natural language processing to georeference textual content, catering to clients across industries such as defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement, oil and gas companies, and publishing. Notably, Schlumberger obtained exclusive rights to distribute MetaCarta's solutions within the oil and gas market.

In 2010, Nokia acquired MetaCarta and subsequently divested the enterprise product line along with the MetaCarta brand to Qbase (currently Finch). MetaCarta’s portfolio features geographic information retrieval tools and the OpenLayers mapping framework, establishing its reputation as a significant contributor in geographic intelligence software. The company's founders include John R. Frank (CEO & CTO), Doug Brenhouse (COO & CFO), and Erik Rauch.

Financing

MetaCarta was initiated in 1999 by John R. Frank during his Ph.D. studies in physics as a Hertz Fellow at MIT. By early 2001, Frank and Erik Rauch had created a prototype for the Geographic Text Search product and formally incorporated the business with Doug Brenhouse. In July 2001, they obtained $500,000 funding from DARPA’s Next Generation Internet Program. Angel investors between 2001 and 2002 featured Esther Dyson, Bob Frankston, David P. Reed, and Pattie Maes.

In October 2002, In-Q-Tel—the CIA’s venture capital division—invested in MetaCarta, with CEO Gilman Louie highlighting the robust demand for geospatial information services; In-Q-Tel made an additional investment in 2004. In December 2003, MetaCarta completed a $6.5 million Series B round led by Sevin Rosen Funds, which acquired a controlling stake—a move later examined in a business school case study. Chevron Texaco’s venture capital arm was part of this syndicate. In 2005, MetaCarta raised $10 million through a Series C round led by FA Tech.

Between 2006 and 2009, one participant of the Series B syndicate entered receivership, while Sevin Rosen Funds underwent internal conflicts resulting in its division and the exit of the lead partner responsible for the MetaCarta investment.

Oil & Gas

In 2007, MetaCarta introduced a product tailored for the energy sector through a partnership with IHS, with Schlumberger securing exclusive distribution privileges within the petroleum industry. The company worked alongside content providers such as the Society of Petroleum Engineers to address use cases related to upstream exploration.

Acquisition

On April 9, 2010, Nokia acquired MetaCarta shortly after the company announced record-breaking revenue growth. Nokia retained MetaCarta's principal engineering team to build the search engine powering its HERE.com location search service while divesting the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July 2010. In 2012, John Frank departed from his position as Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to establish Diffeo. Don Zereski, who served as CEO of MetaCarta at acquisition time, became VP of Search and Discovery at HERE, spearheading startup acquisitions to enhance HERE's capabilities. Qbase reintroduced MetaCarta as part of Synthos Technologies (now Finch), naming Erin-Michael Gill as CEO in September 2014.

Products and services

MetaCarta develops solutions founded on its georeferencing and geoindexing technologies, marketed under the name CartaTrees. Its initial offering, Geographic Text Search (GTS), later rebranded as Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP), integrated keyword queries with map-based filters to locate relevant documents. Delivered as a server appliance, GTS catered to enterprise customers who could not utilize cloud services, including the British Transport Police during the 2012 Olympics. For clients in the oil & gas sector, this product was offered under the name "geOdrive."

Additionally, the company provided web-based services that presented news filtered by location on interactive maps. Notable clients comprised Microsoft Vine, National Geographic, among other media outlets.

MetaCarta’s georeferencing engine leverages comprehensive gazetteer databases containing millions of place names across specialized fields such as petroleum, supporting diverse languages like English, Arabic, and Spanish. It utilizes machine learning techniques to resolve ambiguities in place names within natural language texts, thereby improving the precision of geographic information retrieval.

MetaCarta Labs

Accessible at labs.metacarta.com, MetaCarta Labs developed several influential projects in the fields of geoweb, neogeography, and open source software, which gained recognition at O'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences. Prominent projects included Gutenkarte.org, TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now maintained by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The labs also showcased integrations with platforms such as Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, and Firefox, alongside a map rectification utility.

Before being acquired, MetaCarta contributed the source code of its enterprise content crawler to the Apache Foundation. This contribution became the foundation for the Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF), a mature platform developed over five years for enterprise-level applications.

Awards

2006 - Included in KMWorld's List of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management
2005 - Recognized as a Red Herring Top Innovator
2004 - Featured among Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies
Honored as IndustryWeek Technologies of the Year recipient
Awarded KMWorld Trend-Setting Products twice

External links