Indoor navigations ushers in all-new era thanks to Israeli startup

Standard navigation technology can handily get you from one end of an unfamiliar city to another but it can’t help you locate your favourite brand of pasta, for example, in a supermarket. This realization dawned on Israeli entrepreneur Amiram Frish as he was hunting for such an item in a grocery store one day, over six years ago, while growing increasingly frustrated.

It occurred to him that navigating a shopping mall, an office complex, a hospital, or a massive store can be uniquely challenging, per The Times of Israel.

In 2016, Frish, an expert in geoprocessing, took on this challenge and established Oriient.me, a startup that offers indoor navigation technology for retailers and smart building operators.

He spent the first two years figuring out what doesn’t work. He ruled out GPS and found that building Bluetooth-based hardware infrastructure was cumbersome and costly. Ultimately, Frish discovered that every spot indoors has a unique magnetic field, and with additional funding in 2019, developed an app that uses geomagnetic to pinpoint indoor locations accurately within a one-meter radius.

Tel Aviv-based Oriient.me forged a partnership with MapsIndoors, a digital mapping platform built with Google Maps and called it MapsPeople. This enabled his indoor geo-location to create maps to help people navigate and track indoor areas.

According to Or Shin, a chief business officer at Oriient, the revenue opportunity for in-store navigation services just for US grocery stores is estimated at $2 billion a year. Gartner projects the market for indoor location services to reach global revenue of $55 billion by 2030, which includes asset tracking, people tracking, a location analytics and wayfinding.

“Especially now, with the availability of service staff dwindling, customers must become more independent,” explained Or.

With the system fully developed, Oriient signed a partnership with Google, which is making the Israeli company’s location services available on the Google Cloud Marketplace as a software development kit for both iOS and Android apps. Retailers who use Google Cloud will be able to use the solution to allow consumers to find the products they are looking for in large stores and navigate by a shopping list.