3 Israeli Startups Vying to be the ‘Waze of Indoor Spaces’
Oriient, Navin and
Indoorgo want to help you navigate malls, museums, hospitals and airports
without any need for installed hardware in the venue.
The Israeli navigation app Waze will steer you to your destination along
the fastest route. But it can’t help you find your way inside a mall, museum,
school, hospital, airport or other large building because GPS doesn’t work
indoors.
This problem has caught the attention of
tech companies large and small, including Google and Apple, yet today’s indoor
maps haven’t mastered live navigation functionality.
Three Israeli companies are meeting this
challenge with sophisticated indoor orientation apps independent of beacons or
any other hardware installations in the venue. Each approach is slightly
different, as we explain below.
Oriient, founded in February 2016 in Tel
Aviv, is building a plug-in for app developers on a monthly licensing model.
The technology pinpoints indoor position within three feet using information
from the Earth’s magnetic field and from sensors inside every smartphone.
Many malls, for example, already offer
visitors free dedicated apps that enable them to do a store or product search.
Adding Oriient to that app will provide an accurate indoor positioning service
to guide the shopper directly to the store and even the shelf. The same could
be done in any large building.
“Retailers and facility managers expect
the service to just work without installing or maintaining anything. It’s
low-cost and no hassle, and that’s what drives us,” CEO Mickey Balter tells
ISRAEL21c.
Oriient was incubated in the 8200 EISP accelerator
in Tel Aviv from January to June last year, and then from June to September in
Techstars/Metro Accelerator for Retail in Berlin, a new cooperation between a
German retail chain and an American accelerator.
“Through that platform we gained
significant customers in the European retail space and are working with them on
deployment,” says Balter.
Oriient has five employees and is hiring
more, having received more than $2 million in seed funding.
Navin
Navin took off nearly five years
ago, guided by cofounders including Shai Ronen, a former F-16 combat navigator
and Technion computer science graduate who worked in mapping and navigation
technology at Elbit, Visionmap and Compugen.
Like Waze, the Navin app is powered by
crowdsourcing. Its patented P2P Crowd Mapping technology turns smartphones into
anonymous indoor mapping devices that passively capture millions of data
movement points using aviation-grade stabilization, noise-canceling and
drift-correction algorithms. The app generates maps from these data points.
“We have the novel ability to create
detailed maps of any building anywhere in the world remotely on our servers,
without us ever being in that building,” Ronen tells ISRAEL21c.
Navin was incubated in 8200 EISP and then
in the Microsoft Ventures accelerator. Three years ago, serial entrepreneur
Gidi Barak came aboard as founder and active chairman.
The Tel Aviv startup has 12 employees and
has raised nearly $2 million from investors and the Israel Innovation
Authority. Recently, Navin opened an office in Hong Kong because “Asia is a
great place to start and there is a lot of interest in Hong Kong and Singapore,
which are gateways to other countries,” says Ronen.
The revenue model probably will be based
on in-app advertising from businesses in the buildings mapped, targeted to
individual users’ movement patterns.
Indoorgo
Indoorgo Navigation Systems is
developing an app that makes use of smartphone sensors and existing
infrastructure in a building, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as the fixed
position of the building’s overhead lights.
The core technology was developed nearly
five years ago in the university’s Kinematics and Computational Geometry Laboratory
by professors Boaz Ben-Moshe and Nir Shvalb. Ben-Moshe and Ariel Scientific
Innovations are the primary shareholders of Indoorgo, which has been
exclusively funded till now by Ariel University.
To add any building to the app’s central
database, it must be mapped once by one person – it could be an employee of the
building, with no special training – in the course of about two hours. Data
from subsequent Indoorgo users improves the positioning accuracy, explains
Ben-Moshe. “Accuracy of up to 3 meters is achieved for the first visitor,
gradually improving to less than 1 meter.”
Loev says this resolution is significant.
“Google Maps can throw you off by 10 to 15 meters, while ours will be a product
you can reliably use.”
Indoorgo is in the demo stage and has been
tested in Israeli shopping malls. “The company is now ready for investment or
sale,” says Loev.
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