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deCarta Gets More Cash

Untrue to typical loud form in the press, deCarta quietly raised $10.5M towards yet another round of $21M financing - this one on top of about $40M raised over the years from multiple rounds.  It's unbelievable that the company can continue to convince investors to spend more money when deCarta's core geospatial primitives such as geocoding, mapping, and routing have been reduced to commodities care of Google and Microsoft, and when more mobile & GPS device manufacturers now have their own processing engines. 

deCarta is the last remaining platform vendor that emerged during the first spike of interest in location-based services around 2000 prior to the bubble burst, and that experienced some glory in 2004-2005 when the local search wars started.  All other providers focused on simple geospatial primitive processing have either dried-up-died-and-been-buried, have been acquired (e.g. Kivera by TCS, Webraska by Sanef), or have left the business behind and moved on to more sophisticated offerings.  With timing being everything, I suspect it's now too late to sell the company for a price that would reimburse investors for the contributions made over the years, and unlikely the company can make back the money in sales...   

Posted on Fri, May 9, 2008 at 8:39AM by Registered CommenterJonathan Spinney in , , | Comments2 Comments

Reader Comments (2)

Hi Jon- The difference between the investors and you is that the former actually talked to us about what's happening here now before they made up their minds. - Marc
05-9-2008 | Unregistered CommenterMarc Prioleau
Hi Marc - Opinions are like mouths - everyone has one, and each entitled to his/her own. My opinion is that there's alot of money here, and I think it's amazing it's being invested in spatial processing primitives. Talking to you wouldn't change that impression unless you shared a roadmap that included something beyond this primitive baseline. You can publicly share that here, of course...
05-9-2008 | Registered CommenterJonathan Spinney

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