Mapbox Acquires Fitness AR to Deepen its Focus on Augmented Reality

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Team behind top AR app will lead rapidly expanding Mapbox team focused on design and developer innovation

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Dec 01, 2017, 08:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Mapbox, the mapping and location platform for developers, today announced it has acquired Fitness AR, the augmented reality activity tracking app. Fitness AR creator Adam Debreczeni will join Mapbox to help build out a team of talented designers and developers, focused on showing the art of the possible to create practical AR applications in key verticals such as travel, weather, fitness, sports and gaming. Working together with his co-founder Eric Florenzano, Adam will apply the learnings from building consumer applications for AR and VR, to help build new experiences using Mapbox's flexible location platform.

Launched this past September, Fitness AR was the first mapping AR app, allowing Strava users to connect their accounts and visualize their runs, hikes and bike rides on an 3D terrain map in AR on an iPhone or iPad. Built using the Unity Maps SDK and Apple's ARKit, users are able to explore existing routes projected on any surface in 3D to plan adventures and share their activities. Featured by Apple as one of the top apps in this new category, Fitness AR showed what is possible with maps and location data on an everyday mobile device in AR.

"Designing augmented reality experiences for applications is still a very nascent field, requiring new tools and new thinking," said Adam Debreczeni, co-founder of Fitness AR. "With the Unity Maps SDK, Mapbox is the leader in the exciting new space of AR and location. It's thrilling to join the company at this stage to help build a team and show the world what's possible if you mix real-time location data and AR."

The growing team will work on building out the Mapbox native AR SDKs, designing real-world AR examples with Mapbox location data, and working closely together with Mapbox customers to help bring AR into their mobile applications. Focusing on practical projects such as travel, fitness/sports and weather applications, the team will be able to help developers move quickly from concept to working app by providing the building blocks that solve common problems.

"This is about building interactive experiences. AR is going to be bigger than the browser and bigger than mobile," said Eric Gundersen, CEO of Mapbox. "The addition of Adam and Eric accelerates our play of building a world class team of designers and developers rooted in the future of AR. Not only is this critical to games and mobile apps, but also will enhance our AR guided navigation and enterprise data visualizations."

Mapbox's North American offices are based in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Debreczeni and Florenzano will join a growing AR team and will be based in San Francisco, California. In Europe, Mapbox is expanding their offices in, Minsk and now Helsinki, hiring talent from the automotive, AI, AR, embedded systems, and gaming industries.

About Mapbox
Mapbox is the location platform for developers. Mapbox provides a global map, real-time traffic, location search and navigation via our APIs and SDKs. Our services power industry leaders, including SnapChat, CNN, General Electric, IBM, Instacart, Lonely Planet, Mastercard, Tableau and The Weather Channel. Mapbox is the foundation for other platforms, letting enterprises analyze their data, drone companies publish flyovers, friends find each other, real estate sites visualize properties, satellite companies process cloud-free imagery, and insurance companies track assets. Founded in 2010, Mapbox has over 300 employees with global locations in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Bangalore, Berlin, Helsinki, Minsk, and Shanghai. Learn more at Mapbox.com and follow our blog. Or follow us on Twitter.