The app was the brainchild of Chris Sheldrick, 41, who founded What3words in 2013 with Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam and Michael Dent.
The inspiration came from Sheldrick’s decade spent working as an event organiser in the music industry.
“Every day we were going somewhere else, whether Gate B42 at Wembley Stadium or a back entrance of some villa up a mountain in Italy,” Sheldrick told The Telegraph in 2019, “addresses rarely pointed to the actual place you wanted.”
Vans, musicians and equipment would regularly get lost or delayed looking for the right entrance or backstage loading areas. So Sheldrick began working on an idea to fix it.
Plenty of people have bought into the company formed to commercialise that idea. In the UK, 100 emergency services branches have started using What3words to help with locating people in need.
The company has raised more than £80m from a clutch of blue chip investors. Backers include Mercedes Benz-maker Daimler, Intel, Channel 4, ITV, Ikea and former Formula 1 driver Nico Rosberg. Its recent funding rounds suggest a valuation of around £170m, according to Companies House filings. It turned over £459,000 in the 12 months ending in December and made a loss of £16m, according to its latest accounts.
But not everyone agrees that Sheldrick’s idea makes for a better form of mapping.
Last year, mountain rescuers said they faced trouble locating people using the app. “We are finding there are a lot of spelling issues, which might be from when locations are given to the emergency services,” Mark Lewis, head of ICT at Mountain Rescue England and Wales told the BBC.
Andrew Tierney, a cyber security consultant who has closely examined What3words’ technology, thinks there are too many homophones – similar-sounding words – in the list of terms used by the mapping site to mark out unique locations on the Earth’s surface.
“Of those 40,000 words, there’s 7,697 which also exist in a plural form,” he says. “So that’s 15,924 in total where you can just add or remove an S, which is quite a lot.”
Concerned by emergency services’ use of What3words in light of this potential source of confusion, Tierney analysed the website’s workings (and wordings) last summer. His most concerning finding was two locations with very similar-sounding What3words references that were, in fact, on opposite sides of the River Clyde: likely.stages.sock and likely.stage.sock.
“The biggest concern is really that they said they had designed out this issue where making a mistake would place you on the other side of the world,” added Tierney.
“But it turns out they haven’t. In fact, it’s almost inherent that you will find [location] pairs that are really close to each other.”
