Niantic
The Google side project that got millions of people out of the house to catch Pikachu in a car park.
John Hanke, who had earlier co-founded Keyhole — the technology behind Google Earth — started Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010. The name comes from a whaling ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district. Its first game, Ingress (2012), had two factions fighting over "portals" pinned to real-world landmarks, and that player-built portal database became the foundation for everything that followed.
Niantic spun out as an independent company in 2015 and released Pokémon Go in July 2016 with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. It became a global craze and the first genuinely mass-market augmented reality product. In 2025 Niantic sold its games business to Scopely for $3.5 billion; the mapping data and AR technology moved to a new company, Niantic Spatial.