Snap To Buy Digital Mapping Startup StreetCred; Adds To Location Strategy

Snap, parent of social media company Snapchat, has bought New York City-based StreetCred, which is working on a platform for location data, according to a report from Business Blockchain HQ.

The report stated four StreetCred team members, including Co-Founders Randy Meech and Diana Shkolnikov, will be joining with Snap and commence work on products including map- and location-related products.

One such product will be the Snap Map, which will let users look at public snaps from a given area and share with friends, the report stated. That feature was added last summer to the main Snapchat navigation bar and was drawing around 200 million users per month.

Snapchat has also been working on other products, including Local Lenses, which lets developers make geography-specific augmented reality lenses to interact with physical locations, the report stated.

Meech and Shkolnikov will bring some of the experience from their previous company as well as prior skills, the report stated, as Meech was CEO at Samsung‘s Mapzen, its open map subsidiary. He also worked as senior vice president for local and mapping products for AOL. Shkolnikov, meanwhile, was a former engineering director for Mapzen.

StreetCred previously raised around $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. Meech previously said his goal is to “open up and decentralize” location data from a blockchain-based marketplace in which users could reap rewards for helping collect data, the report stated.

This isn’t the first time Snapchat has worked to expand its wares. Last year, PYMNTS reported that the company worked to use its new Spotlight tool to help attract video creators using other popular platforms like TikTok or Instagram, making available $1 million per day to entice viral creators. Spotlight, launched in 2020, offers a new, continual loop of top user-generated content.