We’re bringing on the team behind Valhalla, the open source routing software, and doubling down on our navigation offering for key auto and logistics customers in 2018. We could not be more thrilled to welcome Dave, Kevin, Kristen, Duane, and Greg to the team, based out of Lancaster, PA.
For the past three years, this team has been working on Valhalla at Mapzen, building a flexible routing engine that can be customized at the time a user makes a request. Adding Valhalla to our navigation stack gives developers the ability to write custom logic to prefer or avoid certain roads dynamically based on specific use cases. This makes it possible to build products like electric vehicle routing that dynamically routes to recharge stations when fuel is low, and elevation-based routing — important for bicycles and electric vehicles. The Valhalla team optimized the engine for running in a disconnected, offline environment, particularly important for in-car navigation. They’ve also built out transit routing in 35+ countries and multi-modal routing. This is the perfect compliment to our highly performant navigation services and investment in OSRM, which allows developers to generate many routes at scale while factoring in real-time traffic from the Mapbox platform.
Before building Valhalla, the team was together for over a decade building navigation at MapQuest. Together, we’ll continue providing the building blocks for navigation, building on our deep open source expertise. We’ll partner to better provide developers all the tools needed to build custom navigation experiences.
Welcome to the team, Dave, Kevin, Kristen, Duane, and Greg! 🏎 🚲 🚚 🚀
Mapbox ❤️ Valhalla was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.