Apple is no stranger to acquiring companies to bolster its Apple Maps offering and now it appears that the company has acquired yet another company to do just that.
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The deal was struck earlier this month, according to a report by Re/code, which cites several unnamed sources.
There are over 10 billion devices on the planet streaming location data on a daily basis. For those unfamiliar with Mapsense and what they do, basically they build tools to help analyze and visualize location data. The transaction amount is somewhere between $25-30 million.
It’s unclear what Apple’s plans are for Mapsense, but it seems to be a sign that Apple is pushing heavier into the location and mapping services space, where Google is one of its biggest competitors.
The report points out that the company “lets users ‘slice and dice graphical models of maps” that hold huge sums of data.
When asked for comment on the acquisition, Apple have given the standard line of: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans”.
Prior to acquisition Mapsense had raised seed funding of $2.5 million from General Catalyst Partners, Amplify.LA, Formation 8, Gil Elbaz, and Redpoint Ventures.
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This purchase joins a series of other noticeable mapping software companies purchased by Apple over the past two years, the most recent being the GPS location service, Coherent Navigation.
