Juha Christensen, CloudMade’s CEO and chairman, said the company is similar to how Wikipedia challenged the encyclopedia. “You went from a small number of people writing articles on a wide number of subjects to experts writing about what they know best. The same thing goes for the map. You can’t hire enough mountain bikers in the world to be experts worldwide.”

This second round of capital was led by new investor Greylock Partners, with Sunstone Capital also participating. Christensen said Greylock, which has invested in many other social networking companies, like Facebook and Gowala, was interested because of the power CloudMade gives to consumers. “It’s the same sort of thing; once the community comes together, it’s an unstoppable thing.”

The company will use the capital to continue building out its map and to add information to its database. The funds will also be used for building the platform that would be used by developers, device manufacturers and mobile operators to build mobile applications. Developers who tap into the platform will share mobile advertising revenues with CloudMade. The data may also be licensed by large companies, Christensen added.

Previously, Christensen has worked in a number of roles, including develop Symbian, which remains the largest mobile operating system in the world, working at Microsoft’s mobile devices division and founding Sonopia, which allowed anyone to start a mobile carrier, or MVNO.

So far, CloudMade has enlisted the interest of 12,500 developers around the world that are working on building applications. Some of the company’s best-selling apps built by third-party developers include: Skobbler, OffMaps, Geocaching, Trails, Ride the City and Gay Cities. The community of map-makers is even larger. In conjunction with OpenStreetMap (OSM), a wiki map of the world, it has attracted more than a quarter of a million users worldwide, who are making over 7,000 edits per hour.