About SF Tech Map.
SF Tech Map is a mobile-first map of the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene: startups, scaleups, big-tech campuses, venture firms, accelerators, coworking spaces, cafes and landmarks, with walking routes between them. This page explains how it is built and the rules we hold ourselves to. We are an independent project and are not affiliated with any company, fund or conference we map.
The principles
- Every place on the map carries a cited source. No source, no pin.
- We use public, openly licensed or first-party sources, never scraped proprietary company databases.
- Hacker houses and homes are shown at neighborhood level only, never as street addresses.
- Data is marked stale when it has not been re-checked, and we show that openly.
- The code and dataset are planned to be open so others can build on them.
Where the data comes from
Each record is built from sources we can name and link to. The kinds of sources we draw on are:
- DataSF, the City and County of San Francisco's open data portal (registered business locations, addresses and neighborhood boundaries).
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR), including Form D filings that many startups make when they raise money.
- Wikidata (CC0) for facts and identifiers, never for coordinates.
- Open place datasets such as Foursquare OS Places and Overture Maps.
- A community-maintained table of Bay Area AI companies published under a Creative Commons license.
- First-party sources: the websites of the companies, funds and spaces themselves.
- Cited press coverage, linked by URL, and community submissions released into the public domain.
The full list of sources and their licenses is in our credits and data-source documents, and every record carries its own source links.
What we do not use
We do not copy data from paid or proprietary company databases, scrape business-networking sites, or lift prose from encyclopedias. We write our own short descriptions of each place, and we show funding and headcount only as broad bands, never as exact figures.
How a place gets on the map
- A record starts from a named source and is written in our own words.
- Its location is placed with a stated confidence level (for example exact address, block, or neighborhood) based on what the sources actually support.
- A machine check and a human check confirm the source still says what we claim.
- Records that fail our publishing checks do not go live.
Privacy by design
- Hacker houses and residential addresses are never published at exact or block precision. They appear at neighborhood level only, unless the house itself publishes its address and opts in.
- We do not collect or publish data about individual people.
- Your own location is never written into a web address or sent to analytics.
For how we handle your email and visitor data, see the privacy policy at sftechmap.app/privacy.
Keeping it fresh
Landmark records are re-verified roughly every 30 days and everything else roughly every 90 days. Anything past its window is flagged as stale on the map rather than quietly left in place. Corrections are welcome: write to hello@sftechmap.app.
Open by default
The code is released under the MIT license and the dataset under CC BY 4.0, so researchers, journalists and other builders can reuse it with attribution. Company logos are never redistributed.
Where we are now
SF Tech Map is pre-launch. The early list is open, and you can add the app to your home screen now so it is ready on launch day. We will email once when the map opens.
Contact
Corrections, press and partnership questions: hello@sftechmap.app.