Inpixon, a Californian indoor data company, has acquired a suite of on-device indoor location and motion technologies, including patents, trademarks, software and related intellectual property (IP), from Iowa-based Ten Degrees.

“These assets provide a best-in-class for device positioning and can operate without an active internet connection or other infrastructure such as Bluetooth or GPS,” said Nadir Ali, CEO of Inpixon. “The addition of this technology within our suite of capabilities further enhances our indoor intelligence platform as one the most robust, in-house offerings available in the market to meet the full range of indoor intelligence needs.”

The acquired assets include a patented platform of services to enable a smartphone’s precise location to be displayed to the user in a mobile app. The technology includes a location engine that delivers dead-reckoning positioning via information derived from the inertial sensors available in smartphones to synthesise an accurate indoor location with indoor map information.

“We are confident that Inpixon, as a leading provider of indoor intelligence, with its comprehensive technology platform, is the right company to leverage and scale this technology,” said Ben Lee, Ten Degrees board director. “We look forward to partnering with Inpixon together with our affiliated companies to offer Inpixon’s suite of indoor intelligence products to new customers and vertical markets.”

The algorithms and on-device technology enable sensor fusion by combining data from various smartphone sensors, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometer and barometer, as well as external beacons, such as BLE, to position a blue dot on a map and correct for drift. The acquisition portfolio includes ten patents, an API library, iOS and Android SDKs, and software code to support Linux-based IoT devices. Inpixon intends to integrate these technologies directly into its Inpixon Mapping product.

With the acquisition, Inpixon has strengthened its Indoor Intelligence platform, which offers a one-stop for customers. It also enables Inpixon to expand its supported features and customer use cases to include body movement and direction facing, as well as worker safety applications such as man-down, adding to established use cases such as indoor navigation, workplace readiness and safety, workforce productivity, customer engagement, asset tracking, messaging, and security.

“With this acquisition we’re adding key capabilities to our in-house offering,” said Adam Benson, CTO of Inpixon. “The acquired technologies run on a wide variety of smartphone and Linux-based IoT devices without requiring any user calibration to help solve users’ day-to-day challenges. We are dedicated to remaining technology-agnostic and supporting a wide variety of third-party blue dot solutions from our robust portfolio of partners, and we are also excited to be able to offer our customers Inpixon-branded positioning as part of our mapping platform.”

Ali added: “We believe these newly acquired technologies can open up significant new markets for Inpixon with customers looking for positioning that doesn’t require installation of infrastructure and that has lower configuration and maintenance effort required. There is a special interest in developing indoor positioning systems that can be easily scaled to mass market applications and deployed in millions of buildings in the world.”

Inpixon specialises in capturing, interpreting and giving context to indoor data so they can be translated into actionable intelligence. The Indoor Intelligence platform ingests diverse data from IoT, third-party and proprietary sensors designed to detect and position active cellular, wifi, UWB and Bluetooth devices. Paired with a data analytics engine, patented algorithms and mapping technology, the products are used by various industries to exploit indoor data. This multidisciplinary depiction of indoor data can enable users to increase revenue, decrease costs and enhance safety. Users can take advantage of location awareness, analytics, sensor fusion and the IoT.