Honeycomb Maps is transforming the way businesses visualize and act on location data, allowing teams to build and share powerful, data-driven map dashboards with their Snowflake data. The company is tackling a major pain point: the limited, often frustrating, mapping capabilities of existing business intelligence (BI) tools when handling large, rich geospatial datasets. In this edition of Startup Spotlight, meet Carston Hernke, founder of Honeycomb Maps, and learn why he decided to build his company on Snowflake. 

Solving a real-world operations problem

Hernke highlighted that the inspiration for the company grew out of a previous role optimizing operations at a large shared mobility provider (renting e-bikes and scooters). Hernke’s team was collecting immense amounts of geospatial data from vehicle GPS units and user app activity, all of which was stored in Snowflake tables.

Operations teams desperately needed a supply and demand heatmap to compare where people were looking for rides with where the fleet was actually deployed. However, their existing BI tool could only show about 500 points or state-level maps, which was insufficient for local operations.

The team needed a tool to easily view all their data on a detailed, shareable, up-to-date map secured with SSO. None of the existing mapping tools they tested were able to deliver an integrated and intuitive solution affordably or at scale, “so I built Honeycomb Maps,” Hernke said.

A new dimension of data: Tying financial performance to location

Honeycomb Maps ties financial metrics (revenue, costs, profit) and operational metrics (fleet availability, delivery failures) to specific areas on the map. This analysis is often powered by the H3 hexagon grid system, which inspired the company’s name.

By building an income statement for each hexagon cell on a map, businesses can ask questions like “How much revenue is this area generating? How much is it costing us and is it profitable?” For a food delivery business, this analysis pinpoints the most profitable areas, enabling a focused marketing strategy. Operational metrics shown can be tailored for different types of businesses: mobility companies may look at average wait time, while logistics companies can look at counts of failed deliveries that must be re-tried. Hernke notes that this type of detailed, visual analysis wasn’t being done before. Putting these metrics on a map makes them “tangible for decision makers … they immediately say, ‘Wow, what’s going on over here?’”

Many Snowflake customers already have rich location data, from customer addresses to vehicle locations to sales territories, but it often goes unused. Building map dashboards traditionally required complex tools and help from GIS experts. Honeycomb Maps removes that friction: business teams can build maps with their data and metrics themselves, without integrations or a separate GIS team. Seeing business performance on an interactive map becomes a quick, accessible step for any Snowflake user.

Building on Snowflake: Frictionless enterprise adoption

Location data is often personally identifiable and highly sensitive. When Honeycomb Maps got started, one of Hernke’s first challenges to overcome was securely and efficiently onboarding and handling new enterprise customers’ data within their existing Snowflake environments.

Building with the Snowflake Native App Framework provided a game-changing solution:

• Security and integration: By bringing the application to the customer’s data, Honeycomb Maps bypasses the need for complex ETL pipelines and SSO configuration, reducing the chance of potential loss of customer data. Instead of taking responsibility for storing customer data on its own infrastructure, Honeycomb Maps’ app runs within the customer’s Snowflake environment and can take advantage of Snowflake’s built-in security and governance features.
• Time to value: A significant benefit has been the sharp reduction in time and resources required to onboard a customer to their “first map.” This means the team can spend less time on mundane enterprise requirements like identity, SSO and data transfer and more time discussing real business problems with prospective customers.
• Capital efficiency: Honeycomb Maps is a lean team, and the Snowflake Native App Framework helps them focus time and resources on their core product — geospatial visualization — rather than on implementing basic functionality like database management and SSO integration. This efficiency allowed them to get their first version into a large enterprise customer’s hands by Q4 2024, accelerating product improvement cycles.

A technical deep dive into the Honeycomb Maps architecture

Honeycomb Maps solves the technical problem of limited BI mapping by providing a secure, enterprise-grade application focused on high-performance visualization.

Maps in existing BI tools will send a request to the database every time the user zooms in or applies a filter. Querying the database and then sending data back to the user introduces seconds of lag which makes the application feel slow and unresponsive. “This design is also one reason maps in BI tools are so limited today: they were designed for showing a few aggregated metrics on a chart, rather than detailed, point-level data,” explains Hernke.

Honeycomb Maps works differently. It uses new web technologies including WebAssembly to aggregate and render data directly on the device, ensuring a “buttery-smooth experience” without relying on round trips to the server for every interaction. This also significantly reduces demands on the database, allowing for low-cost scalability to thousands of users.

The architecture leverages key Snowflake features:

• Restricted caller’s rights (RCR): This feature was a “huge unlock” for the company, according to Hernke. It allows a user’s existing permissions to pass through when using Honeycomb Maps. If a user has permissions to a specific data table in Snowsight, they can build a map from it, but if they share that map with someone who lacks permission, that user will see an error. This helps provide a streamlined experience while supporting strong data access controls aligned with customers’ existing permissions in Snowflake.

• Hybrid Tables: Used to store application metadata, such as maps created, users and map permissions.

• Application roles: Used to provide different experiences to users: ADMIN (can edit any map), EDITOR (can create and share maps) and VIEWER (can only view shared maps).

• Scaling control: The team intentionally built in scaling functionality by default on a slightly larger compute pool size. Customers are given control to horizontally scale the number of service instances and the warehouse size Honeycomb Maps uses, allowing them to start with an economical setup and scale up to thousands of users without managing Kubernetes.

Looking forward: The path to prescriptive AI

Hernke’s most valuable advice, which came from a mentor during his time in technology consulting, is that “value doesn’t come from new technologies, it comes from using them to improve processes and operations in the real world.” This principle guides Honeycomb Maps’ future.

While the current product is largely descriptive, the team’s goal is to move toward being more prescriptive, taking actions automatically based on data.

• Incorporating time-series data: The company recently rolled out an update that adds support for visualizing time-series data. Date and timestamp columns from Snowflake can be animated, showing how events change over time.
• Enabling AI to create maps: The company is working on a machine-readable “grammar” for creating maps programmatically. This will allow customers’ internal AI agents and tools to create maps, similar to how they create charts today, by providing the specialized tooling while the customer controls their preferred AI guardrails.

Hernke’s recommendation for other entrepreneurs considering building on Snowflake? “Identify an existing customer who is also a Snowflake customer, and build and test the application alongside them,” he says. Functionality guided by real customer use cases will always be the most valuable.

Check out the Honeycomb Maps app in Snowflake Marketplace and try it for yourself. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Snowflake for Startups program for info on how Snowflake can support your goals, and be sure to enter the 2026 Snowflake Startup Challenge!

Note: Statements regarding Honeycomb Maps’ future features and product plans are subject to change and do not represent commitments or guarantees of future availability.