Our mission
Spatial insight for every analyst, not just GIS specialists
MapAI was founded in Melbourne in 2025 with a single conviction: location intelligence should not require a specialist licence, a six-week lead time, or a budget for consultants. The spatial questions that matter to planners, retailers, logistics operators, and local government teams are the same questions GIS analysts answer every day. We built a natural-language engine so anyone on those teams can ask those questions and get a map back in seconds.
We are bootstrapped, small, and focused entirely on the Australian mid-market. We are not trying to replace ArcGIS or QGIS for specialist workflows. We are filling the gap between a spatial question forming in someone's head and an answer arriving on their screen.
Accessible, not dumbed down
Plain English is the interface. The spatial logic underneath is precise. We do not simplify what we should not simplify.
Bootstrapped, no shortcuts
We grow by shipping useful things, not by chasing funding rounds. Every decision is oriented toward the person asking the location question.
Australia-first data depth
We index and maintain Australian open data layers (ABS, PSMA, state agencies) so the answers are geographically accurate, not generic global approximations.
Data stays yours
Uploaded CSVs and custom data layers are private to your workspace and are never used to train our models or shared with other users.
Where MapAI came from
The problem we kept running into
Phil spent years building spatial analytics pipelines for logistics and urban planning teams. The same pattern repeated across every engagement: non-technical stakeholders had precise location questions, the GIS specialist could answer them, but by the time a ticket was raised, prioritised, queued, and returned, the decision moment had passed or the meeting had already happened.
Mei Lin spent years building natural language interfaces for developer tooling. She had been watching the same NLP advances that were reshaping text search and code generation, and saw no reason why the same techniques could not be applied to spatial query.
They started MapAI in early 2025 to close that gap. James joined to make sure the tool was genuinely usable for the non-technical analyst who does not think of themselves as a GIS user at all.
The team
The people behind MapAI
Phil Delaney
CEO & Co-Founder
Spent years building spatial data pipelines and analytics tools across logistics and urban planning projects. He kept running into the same bottleneck: the GIS queue. That frustration became the product brief for MapAI.
Mei Lin Chen
Co-Founder & CTO
Spent years building natural language processing systems and developer tooling at data infrastructure companies. She recognised that the same NLP techniques reshaping text search and code generation could work just as well for spatial query, and built the engine that powers MapAI.
James Whitfield
Head of Product
Worked across product roles at mapping and analytics platforms, focused on making complex spatial capabilities accessible to non-technical teams. At MapAI, his job is to make sure a council planner or logistics coordinator can get useful answers on the first day, without training.
Contact
Get in touch
For enterprise enquiries, partnerships, or product feedback, reach us here.
Office
120 Collins Street, Level 20Melbourne VIC 3000 AU
Phone
+61 3 9046 7800Response time
We reply to every enquiry within one business day (AEST).
Thanks for reaching out. We will get back to you within one business day.
Get started
Start answering your location questions today.
Free plan, no credit card, no GIS background needed.