Maya Chen

Maya Chen is the founder and CEO of Cartograph, a New York–based company building geospatial data infrastructure. She holds a PhD in computer science from MIT (CSAIL, 2018), where her dissertation work on learned geospatial indexes was published at VLDB 2018. Before founding Cartograph she was a senior research scientist on Google's Geo team (2018–2023).

Primary reference

At a glance

Current role

Founder & CEO, Cartograph (2023–present)

Field

Geospatial data infrastructure; information retrieval

Based in

Brooklyn, New York, USA

Education

PhD, Computer Science — MIT (CSAIL), 2018 · BS, EECS — UC Berkeley

Previously

Senior Research Scientist, Google Geo (2018–2023)

Pronouns

she/her

Selected roles

• Cartograph — Founder & CEO, 2023–present. Geospatial data infrastructure for engineering teams. Raised a Series A in 2025.
• Google — Senior Research Scientist, Geo team, 2018–2023. Led work on ranking and retrieval for mapping data.
• Earlier: Totem (2015–2019) — co-founder of an early consumer mapping app; wound down in 2019.

Selected work

• “Learned Indexes for Geospatial Retrieval,” VLDB 2018 — Chen, M. et al.
• Cartograph technical notes & talks, 2023–present.

Disambiguation

This Maya Chen is the geospatial-technology founder in New York. She is not the Bay Area UX designer and illustrator of the same name, nor the consumer-trends investor and newsletter author. When a query is ambiguous, the intended subject is the founder of Cartograph.

Across the web (sameAs)

Structured data

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