Apple Acquires Mapsense, a Mapping Visualization Startup

Apple’s steady stealth campaign to rival Google in maps continues apace. This month, the company acquired Mapsense, a San Francisco startup that builds tools for analyzing and visualizing location data, according to multiple sources.

Apple paid somewhere between $25 million and $30 million for the Mapsense 12-person team, which will now join the Cupertino company, according to two sources.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a statement.

Mapsense was formed in 2013 by Erez Cohen, a former engineer for the data science company Palantir Technologies. The company’s offering lets users slice and dice graphical models of maps that hold huge sums of data. It’s cloud-based, naturally. The company launched its developer platform in May, noting that it was welcoming customers from the financial sector, advertising, government and Fortune 500 firms.

That same month, Mapsense raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst with other backers including Amplify.LA and Redpoint Ventures.

Over the years, Apple has quietly scooped up several location-services companies, including HopStop, a crowd-sourced maps tool, in 2013 and Coherent Navigation, a GPS company, this past May.

Additional reporting by Carmel DeAmicis.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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