Apple reached a new milestone in its quest to dominate the world of mapping technology and to eventually take over Google's prominence with the acquisition of Mapsense, a startup company that's based in San Francisco.
The acquisition is said to have cost Apple around $25 million to $30 million, which is a mere drop in the bucket for the company. Apple confirmed the deal to Re/code and had consequently released a statement about the move.
"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," said the company in a statement.
Established in 2013, Mapsense is a team of 12 members, with Erez Cohen as its CEO and founder. Cohen is a former engineer at Palantir Technologies, a data science company that's headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
According to its website, which is still up and running, Mapsense has the advanced technology needed in sorting through huge geotagged datasets that eventually allow them to quickly create geographically-optimized visualizations of location-inspired data points and then allow such data to be embedded into apps.
"Mapsense Enterprise lets you upload terabytes of location-tagged data to segment, visualize and share to your stakeholders to make better location-driven decisions. We work with media companies, mobile apps and advertisers, financial institutions, wildlife research departments, and more to help them deliver insights with less work and more impact," said the company on it its official site.
Mapsense reportedly launched its developer platform in May and had also successfully raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round. Notable backers include General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures and Formation 8. The company plans to use the funding for the future launch of an open source cloud-based system in a move to help developers become better equipped when dealing with massive volumes of location data.
"Mapsense's platform and developer tools help organizations quickly ingest and analyze billions of rows of location data to make more intelligent, locally targeted business decisions across the organization," said Mapsense.
Mapsense is, of course, just one among the several acquisitions that Apple has made in the past couple of years in its bid to create a better and more powerful mapping experience. Earlier this year, the company also bought Coherent Navigation, a company that focuses on GPS hardware and software. Other previous acquisitions include Locationary, HopStop, BroadMap, Embark, Poly9 and PlaceBase.
