About Us

Company details of OpenCage GmbH

Firmensitz Registered Address	OpenCage GmbH Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 7 48153 Münster Germany
Email	support @ opencagedata.com or use our contact form
Registereintrag Commercial Registration Number	Münster HR B 17983
Umsatzsteuer-ID German VAT number	DE323788688
Vertreten durch	Marc Tobias Metten
Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 55 Abs. 2 RStV	Edward Freyfogle
Datenschutzbeauftragter Data Protection Officer	dataprotection @ opencagedata.com

Our story

OpenCage started in 2013 as a project within Lokku, a company with a long history of using and supporting OpenStreetMap. Lokku's primary product was the real estate search engine Nestoria. In building Nestoria 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. In May 2015 Lokku was acquired by Mitula Group. The OpenCage project was spun out into an independent brand, and has run independently ever since.

Prior to July 2019, we operated as a UK limited company (OpenCage Data Ltd, UK Reg. no. 09485974, VAT number: GB251995573 - the company is now deregistered from VAT), before becoming a German GmbH. Details of that transition can be found on our blog.

Our service is built on open data (read all the benefits of open data). Of course our service wouldn't be possible without thousands of people and organisations worldwide who have contributed to the various open geodata projects we build upon. Thank you!

Join us

If working with APIs and large amounts of open geodata is your thing - and let's be honest, who can say no to that? - then perhaps you should join us. Please check out our jobs page.

Supporting geo-innovation

Corporate Memberships

We're proud to be corporate members of

• the OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Association for Geoinformatics, GeoIT and Navigation e.V.

• FOSSGIS e.V.

• OpenStreetMap United Kingdom CIC

Sponsorships

We have a long-standing annual tradition of supporting the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team through financial donations. We provide monthly donations to financially support the development of the libpostal project, and nominatim. We provide mentoring and server resources for the OpenStreetMap GSOC project, and we also regularly sponsor (and participate in) OSM related events and hackathons, including State of the Map 2019.

Our event and podcast: Geomob

We organise Geomob, a regular meetup of location based service creators in various European cities and online, where we do our best to highlight geo-innovation in all forms.

Sign up for the Geomob mailing list, and please come along to our next event. You may also enjoy the Geomob podcast where we discuss themes from the geo industry, interview Geomob speakers, and provide regular updates about OpenCage. We hope to see you at a future event. Please say hello.

Our software

Much of our own source code is open-source. We welcome your contributions!

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, twitter, github, personal site - and Marc Tobias - OSM, twitter, 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.

Learn more

If you've read this far you may enjoy reading/listening to:

• Ed's talk at API Days Barcelona 2019, entitled "How we compete with Google"

• an interview with Ed on the MapScaping podcast

• an interview on the First Things First IoT podcast (produced by our long-standing customer Telit)

• an interview with API newsletter GET PUT POST

Stay informed

To keep up to date on technical changes to our geocoding API please see our Change Log on Github.

The best way to stay up to date on what we're up to generally is by following us on Twitter or reading our blog. Besides announcing new developments to the geocoder we also use the blog to regularly publish interviews with OpenStreetMap communities around the world and various open geo data projects and services. Please get in touch if you're doing something interesting with open geo data.