Geospatial analysis is starting to receive some serious attention in the venture capital community. Less than two weeks after Factual Inc. raised $35 million to help widen the adoption of its location data service, MapAnything Inc. has completed a $7.3 million round of its own to launch a similar growth initiative. The new capital will be spent mainly on increasing marketing for its namesake Salesforce.com extension, which enables users to manage the logistical aspect of their field operations directly through the native interface.

MapAnything overlays information from the customer management platform and a number of external sources onto an embedded Google Places chart to visualize sales opportunities. A dispatcher at a medical automation provider, for instance, would be able to use the service to find every private clinic in a given city and plot the fastest route sales representatives can take to visit each one based on real-time traffic conditions. They could also go a step further and inform the field staff about the insurance affiliation of every practice to help them make more targeted pitches.

Technical service teams are able to leverage MapAnything the same way to streamline support operations, as can practically any other part of an organization that somehow comes into contact with customers. Even an outside event planner could make use of the service to incorporate the geographical distribution of prospects into the venue selection process for a user conference. That broad value proposition has earned the startup several big-name customers including Time Warner Cable Inc. and First Data Corp.,  a roster that the new funding is meant to help expand considerably.

The investment was led by Greycroft Partners and saw the participation of four other backers including Salesforce Ventures. Besides marketing, MapAnything said that the funding will also be used to develop new functionality for its service, first and foremost a series of new apps meant to address various niche use cases.

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