About Us
The who. The why. The where.

Our Team

A team as global as our data.

Every successful team has some commonality that binds them together despite their diversity. Ours is—fittingly—location and distribution.

Our team members are all originally from the US but are now spread across three continents. We believe our distribution gives us a unique perspective of the very idea of “location.” We understand the challenges of providing location data for individual locales with their idiosyncrasies and how to make tools that form a coherent whole in spite of the differences.


Team Members

Portrait of Ian Wagner

Ian Wagner

Founder & President / COO
서울, 대한민국 (Seoul, South Korea)

Ian is a serial entrepreneur who loves making the world more accessible with technology. He fell in love with maps when studying the world map placemat his mom gave him as a child.

When he isn’t “working,” he enjoys learning languages (the more esoteric, the better) and traveling whenever he has a chance.

Portrait of Luke Seelenbinder

Luke Seelenbinder

Founder & CEO
St. Gallen, Schweiz

Luke finds joy in creating beautiful, usable products to solve significant problems. He's visited 14 countries (and counting), and he loves maps because they help him tie many places together into a cohesive whole.

When not building the next great thing, you'll probably find Luke enjoying a cappuccino or hiking the next (Swiss) Alpine spectacular.

Portrait of Zachary Baiel

Zachary Baiel

Support Extraordinaire
West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

Zachary takes pride in discovering and removing roadblocks for individuals, organizations, and businesses. He has worked in the Public, Private, and Non-Profit sectors with a focus on solving problems at the intersection of humans and technology.

Outside of Stadia Maps, Zachary enjoys his family, modular synthesizers, and C-SPAN.

Our Why

A short treatise on why.

Stadia Maps’ story began in 2016 when our founders, Ian and Luke, needed a mapping solution for a perfectionist client. The requirements were beautiful styling, lightning fast load times, and easy configuration. All of this needed to be delivered within a palatable price for the small business. Unfortunately, the current solutions on the market were way out of budget and couldn’t deliver the project’s requirements.

To complete the project, we set out to build a solution that both met our needs and improved on the competition’s offerings.

First, we tackled difficult-to-read and ugly map styling. We needed a basemap that melted into the background and allowed our client’s tightly packed data to take center stage. We solved this by creating Stadia Maps’ first custom style: Alidade Smooth.

You can learn more about our custom cartography on our map styles page.

Second, we had to ensure all of our client’s worldwide users could access the map quickly and reliably. Ensuring worldwide fast and reliable access to many hundreds of gigabytes of data is no easy task. We started with some of the great work done by companies who have open-sourced their mapping pipelines, and then inspected each piece of the puzzle. We analyzed, optimized, and engineered improved solutions. We adjusted each of the individual pieces of technology to improve our mapping pipeline and delivery infrastructure. All of this foundational work allows us to reliably deliver millions of map tiles a day rendered from the billions of underlying points of data to the beautiful maps your users see delivered in your application—in the blink of an eye (or less).

You can learn more about our data pipeline and infrastructure on our infrastructure page.

After completing our custom styles and our infrastructure, we looked for more ways to augment our location data with helpful APIs. We want to facilitate efficient and immersive location experiences for our clients and make life easier for their development teams. We have already built quite a few of these, and have more on the way.

You can learn more about our APIs in our documentation.

And now the world has Stadia Maps—a location data company built by humans, for humans.

We continue to improve Stadia Maps with frequent updates and based on your feedback. We would love to hear from you and start working together. Human to human.