With an aim to pump up its Apple Maps offerings, Apple has acquired mapping visualization start-up Mapsense, as per a latest report from Re/Code. The financial details of the deal are not known but it has been reportedly sealed the deal somewhere between $25 million and $30 million.
As a result of the acquisition, a 12 member team of Mapsense will join Apple. Founded by Erez Cohen in 2013, Mapsense builds software that visualizes, understands, and harnesses massive amounts of smartphone-gathered location data that can then be utilized by apps. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in standard response. The report says that Mapsense ‘lets users ‘slice and dice graphical models of maps’ that hold huge sums of data. The cloud-based company had launched its developer platform in May this year.
It is not clear what Apple will use the Mapsense technology for, but this is just one of a long line of mapping companies Apple has purchased to improve its Maps app. In May this year, the company acquired GPS technology firm Coherent Navigation. In the past Apple has also bought mapping firms such as Locationary, WifiSLAM, Embark, and Broadmap.