CloudMade has raised $12.3m (£7.9m) in a Series B investment round led by new investor Greylock Partners, which joins existing investor Sunstone Capital. The company says it will use the funds to further accelerate its work to build the world’s most comprehensive map and geo database, and serve this data to developers, device manufacturers and mobile operators through its mapping platform.

“This new funding will enable us to significantly expand our support to developers and businesses in building and monetizing apps, products and services that use maps and location,” says CloudMade chairman and CEO, Juha Christensen. “We’re thrilled to have additional backing from Sunstone and a new investment from Greylock and look forward to leveraging their joint expertise.”

CloudMade earns revenue though location based advertising, geo data and premium mapping services. Its mapping platform was built solely for developers and large customers, such as device manufacturers and mobile operators. The company has a rapidly-expanding, 12,500-strong developer community and growing customer base.

The platform enables third parties to easily create applications with stylized and customized map tiles, fully featured turn-by-turn navigation, in-app advertising, local search, and data sets relevant to thousands of consumer activities. Apps that have been built on the CloudMade platform include Skobbler, OffMaps, Geocaching, Trails, Ride the City and Gay Cities.

CloudMade works alongside OpenStreetMap (OSM), a wiki map of the world with over 250m users worldwide, who make over 7,000 edits per hour. Early this year, CloudMade introduced the ‘It’s Your Map’ initiative to stretch the bounds of the OSM community by providing user-friendly apps that enable non-technical people to become map contributors. CloudMade will use some of the new investment to to add to its Mapzen suite of consumer mapping products, which reduces the complexity of creating maps.

Developers looking to build map-based mobile apps or websites can get more information on how to access CloudMade’s services for free here.