Zillabyte’s Funding Maps Show Startups Taking Over Your Favorite Cities

Everyone talks about how San Francisco has been overrun with startups, but now Zillabyte has taken a stab at visualizing it for you.

Zillabyte’s actually a San Francisco-based startup itself. It relaunched earlier this year, offering tools for developers who want to build data analysis apps.

In a recent-ish blog post, software engineer Nikhil Karnik talked about how he used the CrunchBase API, with some help from Zillabyte’s tech, to obtain the city, street address, and total funding raised for venture-backed companies. Then he used CartoDB to turn that data into time-lapsed maps.

I’ve embedded his maps of San Francisco and New York City above. His post includes maps of Austin and Palo Alto, too, and it goes into a lot more detail about the process — check it out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I was also curious about what this would look like on an Bay Area-level, so Karnik was nice enough to create that map for me, too. I’m not sure they show you anything revelatory (turns out that funding for San Francisco and New York really picked up in the last few years — I never saw it coming!) but it’s still fun to see that play out visually, rather rather than just look at a list of fundings.

(And yeah, even though the CrunchBase the team is awesome, the data isn’t 100 percent accurate. I also suspect it may be spottier for the first few years that the maps cover.)