Indoor navigation was something we heard about a lot after the launch of the iPhone and during that first wave of location-based apps. But the technology has quietly evolved over the last few years and may now be more important than ever. Oriient, which powers the platform that Instacart shoppers use to gather their orders in hundreds of stores in North America, this week announced that it has raised an $11 million Series A round, which brings its total funding to $16 million. OurCrowd, Regal Four (a Beren family venture entity), F2 Venture Capital, NGN Partners and Future Energy Ventures participated in this new round.
The idea behind Oriient, which currently has 35 employees, is to offer an indoor positioning platform that can work without any dedicated hardware, beacons or Wi-Fi to locate you inside an airport, office, store or anywhere else without access to a GPS signal. Instead, the company says, it uses “the Earth’s magnetic field, smartphone readings and AI.” Using the compass and other sensors inside a phone and every building’s unique way of distorting the Earth’s magnetic field, it can then f …
