About Us

Independent, self-funded, and profitable

We’re proud to be a profitable, sustainable, self-funded company. We have no external investors pushing us to do things that don't make sense. We take a long-term view, and our money comes from satisfied customers.

Our story

OpenCage started in 2013 as a project within a company called Lokku Ltd. Lokku's primary product was the real estate search engine Nestoria. In building Nestoria, first for the UK and then for 9 other markets, we learned a lot about the challenges of geocoding data from around the world. We also implemented the first ever commercial use of OpenStreetMap (all the way back in the internet dark ages of 2006!), and were one of the first companies to use OpenStreetMap maps instead of Google maps.

2015 Lokku was acquired by Mitula Group. The OpenCage project was spun out as a stand-alone business, and has run independently ever since. Prior to July 2019 we operated as a UK limited company before becoming a German GmbH. Details of that transition can be found on our blog.

Supporting geo-innovation and the geospatial community

Our service is built with open source software and on open data (read about the benefits of open data), and would not be possible without thousands of people and organisations worldwide who have contributed to the various open geodata projects we build upon. Thank you! We're pleased that the business is able to give back to the communities we rely on.

Corporate Memberships

• the OpenStreetMap Foundation
• Association for Geoinformatics, GeoIT and Navigation e.V.
• FOSSGIS e.V.
• OpenStreetMap United Kingdom CIC

Sponsorships

We have a long-standing tradition of sponsoring OpenStreetMap related events and projects, including supporting the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team through annual financial donations. We sponsor (and contribute code to) the development of Nominatim. In addition, we provide monthly donations to financially support the development of libpostal and OpenAddresses.

Our software

Much of our own source code is open-source, we welcome your contributions. As a convenience for the geospatial community we operate FlipCoords, a tool for reformatting coordinates.

One more thing ...

Last, but certainly not least, we proudly support the delightful Vaguely Rude Places Map by providing the hosting for the service.

Our environmental commitment

Carbon removal

To mitigate the threat of climate change, the majority of climate models agree that the world will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the scale of approximately 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050. The world is not on track to achieve this.

Recognizing this challenge, we've decided to commit 1% of our gross revenue to support next-generation carbon removal technologies. This is in partnership with Stripe (our payment processor), through their Climate product. Our contribution is being allocated to the projects they've selected here, which will expand over time.

Renewable energy

The servers that run our API are hosted with Hetzner, and 100% powered by renewable energy.

Management Team

OpenCage is run by Ed Freyfogle - LinkedIn, OSM, Mastodon, and Marc Tobias - LinkedIn, OSM, Mastodon, Github.

Prior to OpenCage, Ed was co-founder of Lokku, the company that OpenCage spun out of (see above for our story). He started his career in the early days of the internet as the first developer at yahoo.de. He has an MBA from MIT, a degree in engineering from Duke University, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Weimar, Germany.

Marc Tobias is based in Münster, Germany. Before OpenCage he was the first employee at Lokku, before that he worked at Yahoo! in Silicon Valley and Munich. Prior to that he was one of the earliest members of the technical team at amazon.de. When not on the keyboard you can usually find him on a bike in the woods.

Where does the name OpenCage come from?

Open data is amazing but sometimes it's also wrapped up in a metaphorical technical cage that you need to be a bit of an expert to unlock. We're doing our best to open up that cage for you by making a very simple to use geocoder. If you have suggestions about how we can make it even simpler please let us know.

If you are looking for logos please see our branding resources page.

Stay informed

The best way to stay up to date on what we're up to generally is by reading our blog or following us on Mastodon. To keep up to date on technical changes to our geocoding API please see our Change Log on GitHub.