Apple acquired Mapsense, a mapping analytics company that will help the company bolster its automotive and navigational capabilities. Apple has reportedly paid a sum of $25 million to $30 million to acquire Mapsense. The latter is a start-up based in San Francisco. The deal has also been confirmed by Apple via an official statement.
The company stated that Apply acquires smaller technology firms on a regular basis and the firm does not discuss its purpose or plans related to the acquisitions. The Cupertino tech giant cum the maker of iPhone has been rumored for quite sometime to be interested in making its own cars. Furthermore, it has also invested in trying and enhancing its Map application. This includes the acquisition of HopStop that helps the users in navigating the municipal transit systems.
The mapping analytics company Mapsense was founded in the year 2013 and it raised a fund amount of $2.5 million in a couple of rounds of funding from the investors. The investors include Redpoint Ventures and Amplify.LA.
Mapsense can analyze billons of devices that are connected digitally and the incoming streaming location data. The platform and developer tools of Mapsense help the organizations to ingest quickly and analyze billions of location data. This way, Apple will get locally targeted decisions in a more intelligent manner across the organization.
The company was involved on location data visualization including self-serve data analysis, mapping engine and developer tools. It lets developers create data driven interactive maps as well.
Apple with the iPhone is a natural fit for the mapping visualization acquisitions as it collects a lot of data from the mobile device users.
The technology companies have been focusing a lot on the mapping data. Back in June, Uber also acquired around 100 employees from Bing of Microsoft to aid in the mapping technology.
