It's a really hard product to make profitable.

The hosting and bandwidth costs are huge, and most of your customers (by raw count and nominal usage) are hobbyists or free products unwilling to pay even a few cents per user.

There is distributed hosting tech for this type of thing at this point. Use it. You could even go old-school BitTorrent, it's been around for decades.

It's hard, but certainly not impossible.

Hosting and bandwidth are key inputs to your costs, but they are manageable.

2017, Mapbox Raises $164M in Series C Financing: https://www.finsmes.com/2017/10/mapbox-raises-164m-in-series...

It's gone poorly since then though. SoftBank SPAC hunts new merger partner as Mapbox deal falters: https://news.sky.com/story/softbank-spac-hunts-new-merger-pa...

VC funding? I think they were funded mostly by grants and their own revenues for the first few years. Then they started taking VC money (over $300M to date).

They were once Development Seed [0], a company that specialized in making geo spatial visualizations for the UN, NGOs and nonprofits. Development Seed was a large contributor of code and modules to Drupal 6 which they left. In the beginning, their open source mapping and geo spatial visualizations projects were mostly funded by grants from the Knight Foundation which funded news related projects. MapBox came from an in-house tool they developed to create and manage map overlay tiles. (I could be making this all up.)

[0] https://developmentseed.org/