The round was led by Mobility Ventures and KoppiCatch.

IndoorAtlas, an indoor location service, has secured $4.5m in a round led by Texas-based Mobility Ventures and the Finnish seed fund KoppiCatch. The valuation is undisclosed, as other investors are interested and as the company is aiming for a larger funding round in the near future.

The company, with offices in Finland and California, is a spin-out from Oulu University, a Finnish institution in the country’s largest northern city. The company has developed a patented smartphone app to track a user’s location indoors, as opposed to a product like Google Maps which helps people navigate the outdoors.

IndoorAtlas has been testing the technology with a large, undisclosed, US-based retailer. The app can optimise shopping lists by navigating the customer around the supermarket, and offers discounts along the way. The location is accurate to within six feet.

The technology is based on the fact that buildings have a unique magnetic fingerprint. The company both discovered the existence of these unique fingerprints and has solved how to use them to determine locations inside. The fingerprint is caused by the steel in buildings distorting the Earth’s magnetic field. Different amounts of steel, as well as changes in the magnetic field at different points on the globe, make each building’s distortion unique.  Equally, the distance from the ground matters, so the software knows which floor a user is on.

IndoorAtlas will use the cash injection to fully launch its product and build its operations in the US.

Inka Mero, IndoorAtlas executive chairwoman, said “We spend nearly 90% of our time indoors. We all know how much we use navigation when we are driving cars, and there are all those use cases available in malls or coffee shops that we have not yet seen.”