Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that Steve Kondik is a board member, not an investor, in Cartogram.
A new startup in Seattle is using smartphone technology to make it easier for people to navigate around retail stores, malls, expos, museums, and more.
Cartogram just raised $326,000 from a group of angel investors for its platform that helps people find things with live interactive indoor maps.
The 8-person company, founded last year, calls its product “Google Maps on steroids” — its built on top of Google’s mapping technology — and aims to solve the pain of finding physical location of a particular store or product inside a big mall, a booth at an expo, a speaker at a conference, or a room at a large resort, for example.
The Seattle Pet Expo recently used Cartogram to help 5,000 attendees locate more than 2,000 booths:
Clients can use Cartogram to utilize beacon technology, while also adding icons, labels, containers, regions, and waypoints on a map that users can see on their smartphone.
Cartogram is led by founder Will Clausen, an engineer who was most recently at Microsoft and has experience at places like Samsung and HP. The company is still raising cash for this round and will use the fresh funding to invest in sales and marketing. Investors include COO Krishnan Gopalan, Gary Rubens, Paolo Alimonti and Param Desai. Cyanogen founder Steve Kondik also sits on the company’s board as an advisor.
Check out the video below to learn more about Cartogram:
