Remember Fatmap, the winners of LOGIN Startup Fair’s Startup Battle and the makers of high-res 3D maps of the outdoors? Last time we spoke, they announced opening an office in Vilnius to handle the development of 3D client side. Now though, Paulius Liekis, Fatmap’s Head of 3D Technology, says launching a Vilnius company was a success that inspired to extend its duties beyond 3D/Unity – they’re now hiring web and back end developers.

Fatmap offers the world’s adventure community 3D maps of the outdoors. Maps that allow you to discover, prepare, explore and relive every journey with expert content, terrain intelligence and geo-enabled features.

The primary feature that FATMAP offers is high-resolution 3D maps that you can use offline on your mobile device. Beyond that it provides you will a lot of extra information about the outdoors: pistes, off-pistes, hiking and biking routes, etc. Combine that with terrain intelligence tools and you will be able to navigate your journey safely and with with confidence.

There are plenty of maps for inner city and inter city navigation, but Fatmap believe that there is a lack of tools for outdoor navigation and experience.

At the moment their public face it an application with 3D maps for mountain sports, but in a long term there is a big potential to grow into a platform for generic high resolution 3D maps.

Hi there! 6 months have passed since your triumph at LOGIN Startup Fair and your announcement to settle in Vilnius, so we’re wondering how did this idea work out?

Paulius: We're happy with the results. We are slowly ramping up our headcount in Lithuania: we're still a small team of 7 developers, and we're planning to double the size in the next 6 months. Original plan was to build our Unity team here, but we stepped up and decided to hire web and backend developers here too. Right now we're looking for developers to take up three challenging roles: frontend, WebGL and infrastructure engineering.

Demand for developers exceeds the supply in Lithuania as it does everywhere else, but Lithuania offers very high quality engineers and there are no cultural differences. The core of our engine has been developed in Lithuania right from the start, so we're here to stay.

Great, and how has your global business been?

Paulius: We closed a funding round in May, raising another £1.9 million from Episode 1 and Capnamic Ventures, venture capital funds from the UK and Germany respectively. This will allow us to scale further: to cover more areas of the world and to provide better navigation tools for our users.

3D maps for winter sports (skiing, snowboarding) is a very seasonal business. One of the goals as a business is to become less seasonal, thus the aim of this summer was to launch MVP of our product for summer mountain activities (hiking, biking, mountaineering). We made a soft launch with 12 maps in July. Now we have to see the feedback, go back to the drawing board and make a public launch of summer product in summer of 2017.

Up till now FATMAP was available on mobile devices only, but we have been working on our SDK for web very hard and we've just launched a first 3D map for our partners at 3 Valleys this week. Our own 3D maps for web are coming soon too!

Could you illustrate the growth of your product in some facts or numbers?

Paulius: We had our official public launch of the app in January this year. From then on we had 100% monthly growth of users. We had around 120000 users by the end of the skiing season in April. It's important to understand that the metrics for app like ours differs quite a lot from most of the apps. A user which uses the app for a week, then doesn't it use it for a year and then uses for a week again is considered a loyal user, because that's how skiing vacation of most people looks like.

We're growing not just in user count, but in our ability to build and maintain map coverage. Before 2016 we had maps for 5 skiing resorts. We had around 30 during launch in January, then around 70 by the end of the season in April. Right now we should have around 120 and the mapping team is working hard to build more for this season. We're planning to take a leap forward and have the technology which allows us to have global coverage in other 6 months.

So what’s next then?

Paulius:

* Establishing web and backend development teams in Vilnius.

* Double the size of our team in Vilnius in another 6 months.

* Launch FATMAP 3D maps on web before the end of 2016.

* Develop technology for global map coverage before Q3 of 2017.