Ariel Seidman

Ariel Seidman is a two-time founder and product leader who has worked in the digital-mapping industry for more than 20 years. He is currently CEO and Co-Founder of Hivemapper, a decentralized mapping network he launched in December 2015. Hivemapper crowdsources a fresh, real-time global map from a community of drivers who mount crypto-integrated dashcams and earn HONEY token rewards for the imagery they contribute; the network is built on Solana and is frequently cited as one of the flagship DePIN ("decentralized physical infrastructure network") projects. Seidman also serves as CEO and Co-Founder of Bee Maps, the commercial arm that packages and sells the mapping data (and related products such as the "Honey Card" for commercial fleets) to enterprise customers.

Before Hivemapper, Seidman co-founded and served as CEO of Gigwalk (founded in 2009), a mobile "gig work" marketplace that dispatched a distributed workforce to complete on-location tasks and served leading mapping companies. Gigwalk was named to Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies (Mobile) in 2013. This early experience building a distributed, incentive-driven human network is a clear intellectual predecessor to the crowdsourced, token-incentivized model behind Hivemapper.

Earlier in his career, Seidman was Director of Product Management at Yahoo, where he ran Yahoo Maps and Search and, by his own account, "fell in love" with geospatial technology. Before Yahoo he worked as a principal product manager at Siebel Systems (later acquired by Oracle). Across these roles he has built a career at the intersection of maps, mobile, marketplaces, and now crypto-native infrastructure.

Seidman is an active public voice on DePIN and decentralized data. He speaks regularly at industry events (SALT, Solana Breakpoint 2024, DePIN Day Austin) and appears frequently on crypto and tech podcasts (Cryptonews Podcast, Solana's "Bits to Bricks," Pod of Jake, Coinage), where he argues that token incentives offer a new model of capital formation for building real-world physical infrastructure in a post-zero-interest-rate era.

• Invests as an individual operator-angel at the seed / early stage, drawing on 20+ years of hands-on experience in maps, mobile marketplaces, and DePIN.
• Natural areas of conviction mirror what he builds and evangelizes: DePIN / decentralized physical infrastructure, crypto & web3 built on real utility, geospatial and mapping technology, mobile marketplaces / distributed-workforce models, and AI data / data quality (he has publicly argued that "quality data" is what makes GPUs and AI useful).
• Stated worldview in his own talks: DePIN "leverages blockchain technology and cryptocurrency incentives to build and maintain physical infrastructure," and represents "an innovative solution for capital formation" — a lens likely to shape which founders he backs.
• Emphasis on real-world utility and defensible data: much of his commentary frames Hivemapper/DePIN against incumbents (e.g., Google Maps) in terms of fresher, community-owned data rather than speculation — suggesting a bias toward teams solving concrete, hard infrastructure problems.
• Note: specific, publicly documented individual angel checks, check sizes, and named portfolio companies for Seidman are limited in public sources; his classification as an "angel investor" reflects individual early-stage investing alongside his primary role as a founder/operator.