Tel Aviv-based Atly, a user-generated social mapping platform, officially launched Wednesday with $18 million in funding from Target Global, Tal Ventures, and FKA Brands. The funds will allow the company to build algorithms to release product features and updates, and to collaborate with additional creators.

Joshua Kaufman, Atly co-founder, believes it makes no sense to search for things like “cafe” or “restaurant” when in reality these are simply proxies for other things like a “place that serves cold brew” or “mouth-watering French toast.”

“And when we finally find a place, the rating and reviews are unreliable,” he said, suggesting that the reviews are incomplete. “Is the cafe rated 3.5/5 because of the coffee? The atmosphere? Weak Wi-Fi?”

Kaufman said Atly brought mapping into the “modern world” by enabling people to search for the specific things they actually want with plain language.

The social mapping platform offers location-based content where users can create community-based maps. Its users have created hundreds of new maps generated organically each month to find restaurants, travel destinations, parenting help, and more.

Atly taps into social media-like user-generated data with map and location discovery tools to help people find new favorite places. In the Atly app, users create and join map-based communities centered around the things they love and are searching for.

The app creates a go-to source for previously unmapped content and surfaces information from like-minded people that allow users to trust in the authenticity, integrity, and specificity of every recommendation they uncover.

The startup hopes to capitalize on the growing list of companies that people turn to find sources of information outside of engines like Google Search and Maps, or Microsoft Bing and Maps. They often rely on social media for destination, activity, and purchase recommendations that feel authentic, up-to-date, and personally curated for them.

Platforms like TikTok and Facebook were not initially build for location-based discovery, but are often thought of as moving in that direction. 

Social media users still are forced to dig through never-ending streams of stories and posts, whose usefulness counterintuitively dissipates the more information is shared, and are faced with limited location-based search, filtering, and bookmarking capabilities. People pay the price of wasted time and effort as well as inferior real-life experiences, and creators and businesses suffer lower return on investment (ROI).