Wayfinding’s Jibestream Acquired By Indoor Positioning Firm Inpixon

August 23, 2019 by Dave Haynes

Toronto’s Jibestream, one of the early entrants in the shopping mall and campus mapping/wayfinding space, has been acquired by a Silicon Valley company known for its indoor positioning analytics.

 Jibestream will be familiar to a number of digital signage solutions companies and when it first started about 10 years ago, was doing everything from the mapping design and back-end to putting screens in malls. They gradually found a better, easier path being the back-end for other providers, and the tech runs wayfinding in places as diverse as the Pentagon and the Mall of America.

The company’s new master is Palo Alto’s Inpixon, which describes itself as a world leader in Indoor Positioning Analytics (IPA). “The Inpixon Indoor Location Data Platform ingests diverse data from proprietary, IoT and third-party sensors designed to detect and position all active cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, and uses a proprietary process that ensures anonymity. Paired with a high-performance data analytics engine, patented algorithms and advanced mapping technology, this technology is used by a multitude of industries and disciplines including marketing, customer experience, operations, facility management and security. “

“Inpixon can now offer all four of the essential building blocks needed to make indoor spaces information-rich and helpful: mapping, positioning, analytics and development tools,” says Nadir Ali, Inpixon CEO. “We believe we are one of very few companies that can offer this end-to-end solution, and that our new, expanded solution portfolio — available today — positions us well to secure a leadership position in what Marketsandmarkets forecasts will grow 42% CAGR to USD 40.99 billion by 2022.”

“Further, we plan to integrate the solutions into an Indoor Location Data Platform which can ingest all of a customer’s indoor data and present a unified, map-based user interface, to give each user and department a tailored, personal view of the information they need to be successful. This is in direct alignment with, and helps us to fulfill, our mission to, ‘Do Good With Indoor Data.'”

“We are all very excited to have joined the Inpixon family,” says Chris Wiegand, Jibestream co-founder and now Inpixon VP of Maps. “Combined, we have a unique and powerful portfolio — from mapping, sensors, and positioning algorithms to video sensor fusion and even GPS technologies. I’m eager to take Indoor Positioning Analytics (IPA) to our customers and partners. Our expanded capabilities will enable us to further deliver on our commitment to make the indoor world digitally addressable to enhance the way people live, work and play indoors.”

Jibestream was one of my earliest consulting clients, back when Wiegand had a handful of staffers and they were still in business planning mode. A lot of start-ups just kinda peter out, so it’s great to see a company grow and have what I hope was a nice liquidity event for the founders and backers.