Sensewhere, an indoor positioning spinout of University of Edinburgh, has secured an investment of undisclosed size from internet company Tencent, TechCrunch has reported.
The spinout’s technology uses wifi and Bluetooth signals instead of GPS to figure out where a user is located within a building.
Tencent’s investment will enable Sensewhere to accelerate the development of its location database, and will result in integrating the service with all of Tencent’s major apps, such as Tencent Maps.
In November 2014, Sensewhere revealed it was making its software development kit (SDK) available license-free to mobile device manufacturers and platform providers. The SDK enables software developers to create location-based advertising on smartphones and wearables.
Julian Ma, corporate vice president of the mobile internet group at Tencent, said “We believe that a superior, universal indoor positioning technology will deeply influence how people interact with each other, and significantly change how companies communicate with consumers and conduct commerce indoors across online and offline platforms.
“Sensewhere’s unique, highly scalable approach will greatly enhance Tencent Maps’ indoor positioning capabilities and enable our users to navigate indoors in a much more accurate and convenient manner.”
