She took a class to learn mapping software and still couldn't make it work. So she built one that anyone could.
Center City, Philadelphia. The founder who decided a map should be as easy to make as a shopping cart is to fill.
Maggie McCullough runs PolicyMap from an office on Walnut Street, where a quietly radical idea has been compounding for more than fifteen years: that the most useful information about a place - who lives there, what they earn, what's being built, what's falling apart - should be one click away, drawn on a map, legible to anyone who can read one.
For a long time it wasn't. McCullough knows this firsthand. Before she was a founder she was a researcher, the person governments hired to figure out what was actually happening in their neighborhoods. The data existed, scattered across federal filings and proprietary feeds. Turning it into a map meant wrestling with desktop software built for specialists.
So she took a course. And she still struggled. That detail matters, because most people would have concluded they were bad at the software. McCullough concluded the software was bad at people.
PolicyMap is the answer she built. It pulls public and proprietary datasets - mortgage records, demographics, economic indicators, environmental hazards, community data - into a single web platform where a banker, a city planner, a hospital analyst or an undergrad can layer them onto a map without taking a class first.
Today that platform serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits, libraries, real estate firms and government agencies. The company has grown revenue by double digits every year since 2019. In December 2023 it closed a $3 million Series A. None of it required McCullough to abandon the conviction she started with. If anything, the market spent fifteen years catching up to it.
The data and maps should be available on the Web, not locked in someone's desktop. Making a map should be as simple as anything else you do online, like shopping. I wanted it to be simple.
McCullough's resume reads like a tour of how public money moves. She started in 1991 as an assistant to the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, in the Executive Office of the President - the room where federal spending gets argued over line by line. She went on to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, then to consulting, then to The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia community lender, where she dug into housing data for a living.
It was at Reinvestment Fund, mapping the impact of the fund's own investments, that PolicyMap began - not as a startup pitch, but as a tool she needed and couldn't find. The first dataset she loaded onto it was a stack of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reports, the numbers she knew cold.
You need a grounded vision, amazing people and patient capital to build a business. And everything takes longer than you think it will.
PolicyMap wasn't reverse-engineered from a market study. It came out of personal frustration - a researcher who couldn't get maps and data into her own work and decided the friction itself was the opportunity.
Division, then benefit corporation, then a venture-backed Inc. PolicyMap changed legal shape three times. McCullough kept the mission steady while the structure bent around it - patient capital, in her own words.
The $3M Series A was led by The Reinvestment Fund, the same nonprofit that incubated PolicyMap in the first place. The thing that raised her funded her growing up.