Mapzen

Mapzen was founded in 2013 by mapping industry veterans together with architects, urban planners, movie makers, and video game developers, and was originally based out of the Samsung Accelerator, positioning itself as an open source mapping platform focused on core components such as map display, search, and navigation. Its core tenet was that all its software and data must be open: its software projects were MIT, BSD, or Apache licensed, and its data projects were CC-BY or public domain. CEO Randy Meech wrote in 2015 that even in areas where open data was clearly inferior to proprietary data, such as geocoding, Mapzen insisted on open data, and would rather spend $500,000 improving open address data than strike a quick deal with a proprietary geocoding service.⁠[1][1][2][3][2][3][3][3][4]

On March 22, 2016, Mapzen released terrain preview tiles, demonstrated over the mountains of Northern California: the data came from multiple sources, including data compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and released as part of The National Map of the United States, and Mapzen was combining it with other global data such as ocean bathymetry and tiling it for access through a tile server. On May 3, 2016, the terrain preview tiles were expanded to worldwide coverage, 10-meter NED data was added in the United States, and Terrarium, Normal, GeoTIFF, and Skadi formats were offered; Mapzen also provided Amazon S3 endpoints and recommended them to developers building in the AWS U.S. East region.⁠[5][5][6][6][6][6]

On October 11, 2016, Mapzen graduated its terrain preview project into the fully supported Mapzen Terrain Tiles service, providing open elevation data for the entire world as raster tiles at zoom levels 0 through 15, in formats including PNG and GeoTIFF tiles in Web Mercator projection, SRTM-style HGT tiles in latitude-longitude projection, and “normal map” tiles that renderers such as Tangram can use to generate hillshades and real-time 3D scenes. The data was aggregated from several open data providers, including 3-meter and 10-meter 3DEP in the United States, 30-meter SRTM globally, and coarser GMTED and ETOPO1 to fill in bathymetry. Mapzen partnered with Amazon to include the terrain tiles in its public dataset program on S3.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

In December 2017, Mapzen described how the terrain tiles were produced: the dataset merges thousands of digital elevation model (DEM) sources of varying resolution from around the world, split into billions of map tiles stored on AWS’s S3 storage system. Mapzen built a highly scalable system on AWS Lambda, Batch, and S3 that first converted the sources into cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs and built a database of roughly 32,000 source footprints, then used a compositing library called Marblecutter to generate the tiles, with bulk rendering run across hundreds of EC2 cloud instances controlled by AWS Batch.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

On January 2, 2018, Mapzen announced that it would cease operations at the end of that month and that its hosted APIs and all related support and services would turn off on February 1, 2018, with no charges for API usage in December and January; because its core products were built entirely on open source software and open data, users could run Mapzen services themselves or switch to other providers, and Mapzen published a migration guide. The guide stated that long-term support for vector tiles would be provided by Nextzen through 2018, funded by an award from Amazon Web Services’ Earth on AWS Cloud Credits for Research Program, and that Terrain Tiles would continue to be available as an Amazon Public Dataset.⁠[9][9][9][10][10]

On January 29, 2018, CEO Randy Meech looked back on Mapzen’s mandate to work only on open software and data, with almost no proprietary elements; its gazetteer, routing engine, geocoder, tile server, and rendering engines had all been set up as independent GitHub organizations with liberal licenses so that they would survive the company’s demise. On January 30, Mapzen published its long-term support plan: maps, vector tiles, and terrain tiles moved to Nextzen endpoints, while 256-pixel terrain tiles remained available through the existing Amazon public dataset S3 endpoints (elevation-tiles-prod).⁠[4][4][4][4][11][11]

On January 28, 2019, the Linux Foundation announced that Mapzen had become one of its projects and that it would provide neutral governance along with support for events, marketing, and intellectual property and other legal matters. Mapzen’s services had historically seen more than 70,000 registered users, and its users included Eventbrite, Foursquare, Mapbox, the World Bank, SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry, HERE Technologies, and Mapillary; its project portfolio included the 2D/3D map rendering engine Tangram, the routing engine Valhalla, the geocoding search engine Pelias, the openly licensed gazetteer Who’s On First, and the public transit data platform Transitland. Randy Meech, Mapzen’s former CEO and then CEO of StreetCred Labs, said the Linux Foundation knew how to enable collaboration across organizations.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

The next day, Mapzen explained that joining the Linux Foundation gave the projects and intellectual property a clear legal framework; no one would work for the Linux Foundation and the Mapzen hosted APIs would not return, but the projects could use it as a place for fundraising to pay the AWS, S3, and GitHub bills for the Tilezen vector tiles and Who’s On First data.⁠[12][12][12]

In a December 2019 project update, Mapzen said that former Mapzen team members had submitted thousands of pull requests across the projects that year; free hosted access to the vector and terrain Tilezen tiles continued to be supported by AWS research grants through April 2020, and in addition to access via Nextzen with an API key, 256-pixel terrain tiles remained available through the existing Amazon public dataset S3 endpoints.⁠[13][13][13]

As of October 2026, Terrain Tiles was listed in the Registry of Open Data on AWS as a global dataset of bare-earth terrain heights tiled for easy use and provided on S3, managed by “Mapzen, a Linux Foundation project,” with the data stored in the elevation-tiles-prod bucket in the U.S. East region and a replica bucket in the EU region, accessible without an AWS account. The license and attribution requirements for Terrain Tiles are set out in the attribution file of its code repository, tilezen/joerd: users must credit data providers including the U.S. Geological Survey (3DEP, GMTED2010, SRTM), the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (ETOPO1), the EU’s EU-DEM, ArcticDEM, and national providers in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and must also credit Mapzen when using Mapzen’s hosted service.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][15][15][15][15][15][15]

Mapzen: Official website: https://www.mapzen.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Terrain Tiles (Registry of Open Data on AWS): Official website: https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

GitHub: Official account: https://github.com/mapzen (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mapzen (opens in a new window)⁠[16]