Baidu invests $10M in Finnish indoor mapping startup IndoorAtlas

Chinese search giant Baidu has invested US$10M in IndoorAtlas, a Finnish startup that develops smartphone technology to track real-time movement indoors. The company will use the funds to improve its research and development, and it will also enter an exclusive agreement with Baidu that will bring its mapping technology to the Chinese market.

“With this partnership, we now have access to over 1.34 billion potential subscribers at one go,” says Janne Haverinen, founder and CEO of IndoorAtlas, in a statement.” We see this as a huge opportunity not just to make a mark in Asia, but globally, and to make indoor location services ubiquitous and available to everyone.”

Founded in 2012, IndoorAtlas lets its users – business owners, most likely –  create location-specific “magnetic fingerprints” for indoor spaces. Using a smartphone’s built-in magnetometer (if your phone can use a compass app, it’s got one), IndoorAtlas will determine the specific magnetic fields in a steel structure, which ultimately form a map of sorts. Subsequently, smartphone owners who open apps that use IndoorAtlas’ API can then determine their own location within the space.  The team claims that sensing magnetic variations to determine one’s location in an indoor space is more accurate than GPS or Bluetooth-based technology.

It’s easy to dream up any number of use cases for technology that tracks one’s proximity indoors, but IndoorAtlas has thus far targeted brick-and-mortar retailers. Businesses looking to sell more products to their customers, for example, might use IndoorAtlas to guide them through the physical store, offering promotions along the way.

While fellow Chinese internet titans Alibaba and Tencent will invest in startups abroad with some regularity, it’s not often we hear of Baidu sinking funds in companies outside of China. But IndoorAtlas makes a perfect fit for Baidu. The Baidu Maps mobile app currently has more than 70 million daily active users, and the company has an affinity for extracting the data it accumulates through its mapping services. Earlier this year, it released a heat map showing the most popular destinations for travelers during Chinese New Year.

Meanwhile, China’s leading internet companies have lately been very aggressive when it comes to incorporating smartphone technology into everyday shopping experiences. Just last week, Baidu, Tencent, and Wanda teamed up to form a US$814M venture to bring mobile in-store payments into the latter firm’s theme parks and movie theaters.

See: Tencent and Baidu’s joint venture with Wanda signals the coming tide of WeChat payments

Over the past year, Alibaba and Tencent have brought their own respective payment services into convenience stores and malls across China in an effort to replace physical wallets with virtual ones. It’s not clear how Baidu’s strengths in mapping and data might influence the rivalry between Alibaba and Tencent, both of whom will continue to persuade consumers to favor its own payment and shopping products. But brick-and-mortar retailers in China look set to benefit from more channels to market through, and more competition for their cooperation.