Superlocal - Perplexity Meets Google Maps

Company & Team Introduction

Superlocal is the leading personalized mapping platform powered by AI, bringing new features and experiences to an enormous but stagnant industry. Founded all the way back in 2016 by Alex Kehr, Superlocal began as a platform to build, buy, and sell WhatsApp stickers that blew up to north of $125K/month via subscriptions but later ran into retention issues. Kehr then pivoted his efforts to a group-based messaging app named Pop, which quickly gained traction amongst university students from UCLA and Syracuse to find parties before the app saw steep declines due to COVID lockdowns. In the face of uncertainty, Kehr decided to pivot the product once again, this time to the current mapping product. Before founding what is now Superlocal, Kehr graduated from UC Boulder with a Bachelor of Science degree and worked as Global Growth Manager for VC-backed startup LeadBoxer. Superlocal’s team has a vision to help connect communities around the world and enhance real-world interactions. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California and has steadily grown its team to ~27 employees.

Product Overview

Superlocal is the intelligent AI map that adapts to you. When the Superlocal team started building their product, they set out to fuse the best parts of Apple and Google Maps with cutting-edge AI to provide contextual details and personalize your map based on current and historical data. The company offers a host of different features, including:

AI Map Search: Personalized answers in real-time and tailored suggestions that improve with every interaction.
Timeline: Automatically document your life via the places you’ve been.
Memory Recall: Users can ask questions and retrieve information about places they’ve been in the past.
Intelligent Local Guides: Like having a knowledgeable friend in every city in the world.
Fog of World: Allows users to track how much of the world they’ve uncovered, find hidden gems, and gamify adventures.
Stats & Sharing: See how many cities, countries, and places you’ve been, compare your worldwide rank with others, and share cool places you’ve been with friends.

Total Addressable Market

Superlocal’s novel AI native mapping product makes the exact total addressable market for the company difficult to estimate. An analysis from Grand View Research indicates the mobile mapping software market was as large as $31.78B in 2023. In addition to the already massive opportunity, the vertical is forecasted to see a healthy 16.4% CAGR from 2024 to 2030, leaving Superlocal in a prime position to capture a portion of its potential $79B market opportunity.

Business Model & The Numbers

Superlocal uses a freemium business model, monetizing via recurring subscriptions and also generates additional revenue through its branded e-commerce store. For the Superlocal platform, the company offers a free 3-day trial of the paid plan, then charges $39.99/year for SuperBoost+. Superboost+ gives users access to additional features such as premium and advanced life analytics, increased Fog of World radius for leaderboard ranking, 2x free coin chests to accelerate worldwide ranking, access to limited Superlocal merch drops, and early access to new features. In June, Superlocal announced it had surpassed 19,00 paying users on its platform; multiply that by its annual pricing of $39.99/year, and the company is somewhere in the vicinity of ~$750,000 in revenue in just over a year after starting to monetize the product.

Traction

Since pivoting to their mapping product, the company's traction has been promising. At the start of 2024, the company announced that over 2,000,000 places had been visited using Superlocal. Feedback for the platform has also been quite strong, with an average 4.1-star rating from over 2,000 reviews. In addition to Superlocal's strong analytical performance, their app was recently featured as an essential social app on the App Store, driving increased organic traction. Superlocal’s user base is also highly diverse, with users now spanning over 100 countries.

Competitors

The market dynamics of the digital mapping industry are interesting, as there are essentially two major incumbents in the space: Google Maps and Apple Maps. Superlocal aims to incorporate a blend of both these applications (usability, navigation, data quality, etc.) and utilize AI to provide personalized, contextual details to the user based on past data that incumbents don’t offer. Superlocal also has additional features such as fog of the world, which allows users to track how much of the world they’ve discovered via a line that tracks GPS coordinates, has memory recollection, searches with real-time personalized answers, stats, etc., giving users a much broader feature set than incumbents provide and are constantly adding new features to improve their product while Apple and Google’s products remain seemingly stagnant.

Funding

Superlocal has raised multiple rounds of funding through its pivots over the years. The company has been discreet about its funding events, but its mapping product is backed by a catalogue of top venture firms, including General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Science, DCM, and M13.