Hey, I’m Pava, the CEO of EcoMap Technologies. We’re a Baltimore-based growth company that creates platforms that make it easier for people to navigate ecosystems.

<aside> 👋 What’s an Ecosystem? A network of resources, organizations, people, events, jobs, and other activity that is unified by a geography, demography, industry, or combination of those

Baltimore’s small business ecosystem, the Web3 Ecosystem, T.Rowe Price’s Partner Ecosystem, etc - that’s what we mean when we say ecosystem.

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If you’re finding this page, that means you’re coming from Baltimore.EcoMap.Tech. This site has a very special place in my heart - it was the MVP of our first-ever EcoMap platform, put up in early 2020 to help people navigate Baltimore’s business community. We thought that it should be easier to access the information about the resources around us - it ends up everyone agreed. Practically overnight thousands of people used it to find resources for their businesses, connect with each other, and access information on local organizations that could help them grow.

Pretty soon, we started getting requests from organizations across the world to create platforms for their ecosystems, from local business communities to entire industries. We sprinted to keep up with this demand, growing incredibly fast - hardly able to sustain all of the customers who wanted EcoMaps. What started as a college student’s idea quickly became a real-life company, seemingly overnight.

Of course that night was actually 2.5 years of a global pandemic, but I digress. Today, EcoMap is a 16 (soon to be 22!) person company, and we’re just about to announce a $3.5M fundraising round to fuel our growth. It’s all good news, and it’s a testament to Baltimore’s growing tech ecosystem. But it’s because of that announcement that I’m writing this letter today.

The Baltimore EcoMap is one of the most special things to me as a founder, because it shows where we came from - a Webflow site held together by technical duct tape (Zapier). It represents the first version of a product that now reaches hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of ecosystems across the world. It represents the earliest days of this little startup, which now joins the rank of “rapidly-growing venture-backed tech companies”

Because it’s so special, I kept it online - and I would keep it online forever, if it wasn’t for one crucial issue:

<aside> 👋 People keep thinking it’s an EcoMap

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Now, of course, it is an EcoMap - but it is our Version 1. We’re now on like, V5. And V5 is much more powerful, much more functional, and much more robust than that little Webflow site. Users kept making profiles, even though profiles don’t do anything. Investors kept asking us why there were so few features. And potential customers kept bugging us about why the data wasn’t updated.

When people find an EcoMap platform, they need to be seeing the best we have to offer, because that’s how we continue to grow this company.