Esri Acquires Location Platform Geoloqi, Plans To Launch Alternative iOS Mapping Library Soon

Geoloqi, the Portland, Ore.-based location-based platform that helps developers add location-based features to their apps, today announced that it has been acquired by Esri, a long-established GIS company that provides online mapping solutions for developers and geographic intelligence for business analytics systems. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Geoloqi was founded in 2010 and raised about $350,000 in a seed round in 2011. Most recently, the company announced a number of partnerships with companies like Appcelerator, Factual and Locaid that, the company said at the time, would give it the potential to reach 1.6 million developers. In today’s announcement, Geoloqi also noted that it currently serves about 1,000 developers and customers. These users will continue to be able to use the company’s current products and service will not be interrupted.

Esri, which was founded in 1969, currently provides its GIS technology to about 300,000 organizations worldwide, and its clients include a number of national governments, large cities, Fortune 500 companies and over 7,000 colleges and universities.

“We are excited to have the team at Geoloqi and its technology become part of the Esri family,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri’s president in a canned statement today. “Geoloqi’s capabilities and relationships with the developer community will build on Esri’s already impressive suite of ArcGIS products to create more dynamic mobile and web applications.”

According to Geoloqi co-founder and CEO Amber Case, the two companies’ tools and platforms “are very complementary.” Geoloqi will now become Esri’s R&D Center in Portland. The R&D Center, the companies’ noted in today’s announcement, will be focused on developing new tools and features to “create improved, integrated products that accentuate the strength of a combined platform.”

New Products Coming Soon

The two companies are already working to bring a number of new features to their users, including extended geocoding features using Esri’s ArcGIS Reverse Geocoding service, for example. In addition, the two companies will soon launch a new alternative mapping library for iOS. The ArcGIS iOS SDK, says Esri, will provide developers “with an alternative to MapKit, the default mapping library on iOS. The ArcGIS SDK provides access to high quality map tiles in a programming interface similar to MapKit.”