Niantic (company)

Founding

The company was formed in 2010 by Keyhole, Inc. founder John Hanke as Niantic Labs, an internal startup within Google. The company took its name from the whaling vessel Niantic, which came to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush in the 1800s. The ship itself was named after the Niantic people, a tribe native to the New England area, where the ship (like many whaling vessels) originated. In fact, the officers of the crew who famously brought the ship to San Francisco were all of the Cleaveland whaling family of Nantucket. The Niantic people referred to themselves as the Nehantucket.

Field Trip

Niantic's first product, published in 2012, was Field Trip, a location-based mobile app which acted as "your guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you."

Ingress

Niantic's first augmented reality game Ingress was initially made available on Android by invitation only in November 2012 then released publicly in October 2013. An iOS version was released in July 2014.

Initially, Niantic had taken an alternative approach to monetization, veering away from more traditional mobile application development standards such as ad placements and in-app purchases. However, following the split with Google in 2015, in-app purchasing was implemented for Ingress. Founder and CEO John Hanke has noted that Ingress is a sort of proof of concept, adding that a next step could involve packaging application programming interfaces (APIs) from the Ingress application in order to entice developers. Existing partners, marketed through the narrative of Ingress rather than direct marketing techniques, include Hint Water, Vodafone, Motorola, AXA, SoftBank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Lawson (store), and Ito En.

Endgame: Proving Ground

Niantic's second announced mobile game, Endgame, "is" (unreleased) a transmedia storytelling project consisting of an alternate reality game, Endgame: Ancient Truth, novels by James Frey starting with Endgame: The Calling, and the mobile app, Endgame: Proving Ground.

Spinoff from Google and Investments

The company spun out of Google in October 2015, soon after Google's announcement of its restructuring as Alphabet Inc. During the spinout, Niantic announced that Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company would invest up to $30 million in it to support the growth of the company and its products. In February 2016, Niantic announced that it secured an additional $5 million in Series A funding including investment from venture capital firms Alsop Louie Partners and You & Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures, as well as angel investors Lucas Nealan, Cyan Banister, and Scott Banister. While adding more support for the growth of the company, this investment enabled Niantic to bring in strategic industry pioneers including the addition of Gilman Louie to its board.

Pokémon GO

In September 2015, it was announced that Niantic was developing Pokémon Go in partnership with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for iOS and Android devices. The game was initially released in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States in July 2016 (and released to much of the rest of the world throughout the remainder of 2016), where it became an overnight global phenomenon, significantly increasing the use and visibility of augmented reality technology. In addition to topping app store charts in most regions, Apple Inc. announced that Pokémon Go had became the most downloaded app in a first week ever, which was topped by Super Mario Run later that year. Reports indicated that users were spending more time on Pokémon Go than on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tinder, and Instagram. In one month, Pokémon Go was downloaded more than 100 million times, with daily revenues exceeding $10 million. Exactly two months after its launch, at Apple's September keynote, John Hanke announced that Pokémon Go exceeded 500 million downloads worldwide and that players around the world had walked over 4.6 billion kilometers. By December, it was announced that the kilometer distance achieved in September had nearly doubled to over 8.7 billion kilometers, meaning that players had collectively walked further than the distance to Pluto. By the end of February 2017, Pokémon Go had surpassed over 650 million downloads.

Like Ingress, Pokémon Go has a similar approach to monetization. The game has two main revenue streams, in-app purchases and regional partnerships. To date, Pokémon Go has established several partnerships around the globe among which include Sprint and Starbucks in the United States, Reliance Jio in India, and Unibail-Rodamco in Europe.